Just throwing it out there, you can put a Node.js application on Heroku with essentially zero custom setup. Granted, more expensive than shared hosting, but if you value your time at all then the time savings are huge (especially compared to a VPS).

You need to install Composer, the PHP package manager, and then install it, but there aren't a whole lot of OS dependencies there. You don't have to install node, then npm, then... ad nauseum. You just drop a composer binary on there, and then run composer install, and it installs the app dependencies.

I personally find it much less headache-inducing than NPM, but I think practically, they're about the same in terms of what they do.

What you described is literally the same process. No need to arbitrarily bash other programming languages or ecosystems.

PHP:

(1) Install PHP (2) Install Composer (3) Run 'composer install' to download dependencies

Node:

(1) Install Node.js (2) Install npm (3) Run 'npm install' to download dependencies

Well he did refer to most shared hosting which do usually come with php already installed, and you may not have sudo. installing composer is simply curling a phar file, or you could even bundle it into your repository if you want to, im really not sure what to tell you.