This is such a stupid, stupid argument. Anyone who makes this argument has clearly never written PHP or has some personal stake in the Node.js ecosystem.

I've written Node.js/Javascript/TypeScript for the past 5-years and my last few projects have been Laravel just because of how damn easy it is. I've used Next.js, Gatsby, [insert flavor of the month here], but nothing has stood the test of time like PHP has. I never had a PHP server die on me because of a lost network connection. I never had a PHP server kill thousands of connections because of one error. I never was 4 versions behind a framework because it changes every fucking week. PHP never had me deploy a Kubernetes cluster with seven thousand pods and monitoring systems just to stay alive.

Node.js is a horrible programming language with a worse package system and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't had the privilege to work with something else.

The only person who seems to have personal stake on Laravel is you. No mainstream backend framework make you have your infra managed in k8s. There lots of reason to not use Laravel or PHP (or ruby on rails, or django, ...) in general. "It won't beat Laravel" , why? That's like saying to Django maintainers: give up what you are doing , because you will never beat Spring/Actix/.... Laravel might be useful for people who want to go the PHP route, but most people don't(save the wordpress sites fallacy). Also benchmarks put Laravel, and even Lumen in the bottom of the list (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ ), I get the appeal of Laravel, and I have used it in the past. But is not like the only and must have solution for all problems. Edit: I wrote this before noticing you called NodeJS a "programming language". Well there is that, but my point remains.

You are right, it is a stupid argument, but does answer "why?"

You think clients care?

I think if you're starting up today you may find easier to find someone who can build you a site with React than with PHP. Or if not today, then give it a few years.

Likewise I think someone starting up for themselves is more likely to be a React programmer than a PHP programmer.

I think it's hard to fine good PHP developers.

I also think it's damned near impossible to find React developers who are capable of doing anything that isn't React flavored.

For those reasons alone, I'd choose PHP over React, especially if I want to scale.

If the argument is that clients don't care (the comment I was replying to) then why would it matter to them that their develoeprs struggle with things that aren't React-flavored? Especially in 2021, when you can build just about anything on the web and stay within the React ecosystem.

Because real businesses that generate real revenue through software processes usually require more than tinker-toy websites built on a teetering pyramid of dependencies.

Couldn't agree more. The people who are against using PHP are those who never used it and think they are being clever and ahead-of-the-curve by bashing it.

Who said they were against PHP? I'm just said there are probably more React developers around these days than PHP ones, thus it's probably easier to hire from that pool.

Laravel is well-integrated with Vue.js as an option so you might want to look into that.

Oh, I know, I'm just poking at the "I know this thing so everything that we deal with must have a solution derived from this thing" crowd. The SAAS company I work for is about to start migrating away from the monolithic framework we have to a tiered services architecture, and we'll be using laravel because it meets our needs.

The CTO and security teams and devs will care. The language decision has a broad impact on how to secure the application, engineering community (who can you hire), etc. It’s a big decision.

So PHP should be the obvious choice then, considering what a bloated mess and security nightmare Node.js is.

As someone who ran a company for 5+ years on a Node.js stack, never again.

Before when I managed 5k+ servers running PHP, I actually slept at night knowing nothing was suddenly going to go wrong because of some stupid memory consumption bug or exploit in a popular and critical package.

Laravel and modern PHP are as secure as Rails or Django and arguably more secure than plain Node.js. Your point is at least 10 years out of date.

Clients may not care but the founder or development team may.