I trust Apache to spin up a new PHP process for each request. Except under DOS attack or with some horrendous memory leak, it's just solid. Obviously it's a lot more overhead. But if there's some uncaught exception in a corner of PHP code, it doesn't crash the main thread and drop all the other processing on incoming requests. This means that a bug a user discovers is usually something I can fix during business hours, not get woken up at 4am because "the server is down". I use PM2 when I manage Node and it does a fairly good job of keeping things running and well-logged, but to me the Node event loop is just a single point of failure I don't need unless I'm building something that really needs Node's architecture, like a fast-paced game or chat. (And I've even done those with PHP). And then in cases where I need the server to do a few seconds of heavy data processing like collating large reports once they come back from a database, with Node you need to spin up a worker pool to not block the loop with those operations, which complicates reliability even more; with PHP you can get away in a lot of cases with letting the thread spawned by the call just take its time to chew through a bunch of math.

I've always been a fan of stateless code wherever I can get away with it. My casino, for instance, ran on PHP, and although it upgraded the connection to a socket where possible, it created a new DB connection and loaded the game state from SQL, then stored a new game state, for every single action a player took within a game, e.g. every hit within a hand of blackjack. The database was at all times a consistent snapshot of the entire state of the casino. A single player's action might fail and roll back, but it wouldn't bring down the whole site and lose all the other actions in progress.

In some respects, it's also just that I think setting up an Express router (or Koa, my preference) and graceful handlers and 404 handlers and everything in Node is overkill if you just want to serve web pages, validate forms or handle RESTful API calls. DB connections go down and you may need to recover from a slew of failed queries in rapid succession instead of just counting on a new DB connection being tried for each incoming request.

Node really shines with anything that requires statefulness on the server, low latency, push data, etc. And for me the nicest thing about Node is the ability to share the same unified data classes between client and server. But I view Node kinda like a Porsche. High performance, a bit unreliable and dangerous. Great to have in the garage. But when you're just driving to the market you're better off taking the Subaru.