What's been strange to me though is I've heard JS advocates lobbing those criticisms at PHP, making the case for, say, why 'Node is awesome, PHP sucks'. Conflating a framework vs a language, then pointing out PHP 'issues' that also exist in JS... there's generally little point in trying to engage/correct at that point (context: primarily conference hallway conversations and meetup groups back when those actually happened).

JS is the new PHP. Part of the problem with massive popularity is it attracts also the lower ability devs and the ecosystem slowly degrades due to this. This cascades.