They're both sequential by default and lack threading, and that's hard to mess up. They're both great languages for easy projects.

PHP code is a breeze to work with using composer, and most packages use namespaces and have great intellisense. But good luck doing anything concurrently.

NodeJS is fast, and boy can it handle a lot of tasks at once using the event loop! But I can't for the life of me figure out modules or get good intellisense.

There's plenty of high quality code in each. I'd just never write a complex app in either.