Not at all. I have worked with both for a long time and I can clearly see the differences. They are used for different purposes. The people comparing any PHP frameworks to NextJS have not been very experienced with frontend development, IMO.

Comparing strictly SSR yes. Though if one needs a lot of dynamic client side behavior a JS framework can be easier to reason about.

Lately modern PHP frameworks have so a lot of dependencies too. So both stacks are getting fatter as their capabilities grow.

Not necessarily. I recently rewrote an old web application written in php and jquery with django, react and typescript. The new application has roughly the same LoC count while having more features and better interactivity.