Personally I've been using both PHP and Node/React extensively and let me tell you there are very good reasons for the React/Node/JS ecosystem to exist and they are decidedly not borne out of ignorance of the PHP ecosystem. Ryan Dahl (inventor of Node and Deno) said that he created (paraphrasing) "the PHP of this generation" and React was invented within the probably the largest PHP shop to date.
PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking backwards compatibility.
Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing so accidentally or because of lack of experience.
PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking backwards compatibility.
Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing so accidentally or because of lack of experience.