Of course you don't have to have nodejs to handle large amounts of http requests, if you spend enough time you can get any language/framework to handle the amount you need :)

But, seems that at least in the TechEmpower framework benchmarks, es4x (JS) ends up on position 9 while the closest PHP framework ends up at 13. Now it's just a small benchmark with specific tests, but I do think it's easier to make NodeJS handle large amount of requests than PHP. Although again, you can definitely do large amounts of requests with PHP too. I've spent about 5 years on each, found that getting good performance out of V8 is easier than out of PHP.