I've rewritten a ton of legacy PHP services / page generation code into NodeJS over the last couple years. I know PHP inside-out and love it the way you love... um, something fugly like an old futon. It's really nice to be working in Typescript on both ends now, to have share modules and data models between server and client codebases. But one thing I do miss about PHP is not needing to make sure the server restarts on every backend code change. Nodemon and PM2 are both pretty good about this, but it's that one out of ten times they don't restart and I spend a minute or two wondering what I missed before realizing they didn't restart; happens a few times a week and drives me up the wall.