As others have said, PHP just "being available" on EVERY webhost, and the royal pain in the ass it is for normal "Joe Sixpack" site owners to even get node.js on their hosting guts ANY argument about node.js being somehow magically "easier".
NOT that it is in a 1-up comparison anyways. If you can't handle the minor differences in syntactic sugar, you probably shouldn't be writing websites anyways since both PHP and JavaScript are little more than C tarted up in a frilly dress -- the only REAL language difference is the shade of lipstick and the size of the breast implants.
THAT SAID, you mention react -- which to my mind means if you're looking at server-side hosting technologies you aren't qualified to choose one. This is because the moment actual server side development is involved you are talking about making a WEBSITE -- and bloated train wrecks of scripttardery like react, like angular, are walking talking WCAG violations.
MAYBE it's because my freelance work consists almost entirely of bailing companies, banks, healthcare and government organizations OUT of fines and civil litigation for accessibility failings (yes, you CAN be fined or sued in some countries for this. See the US ADA, the UK EQA, etc) but scripting heavy garbage like that almost always results in inaccessible websites that are a giant middle finger to large swaths of users for ACTIVELY encouraging you to build websites that don't work scripting off.
... so if you are using those by choice in building your sites, you aren't qualified to be building websites.
If you are "building your user interface" with JAVASCRIPT, and we're talking about a WEBSITE, you ****ed up!!! That's NOT JavaScripts ***ing job on a website!!!
Content of value, marked up semantically, styled and layout in CSS, enhanced with JavaScript as desired so long as said scripting gracefully degrades. THAT IS DESIGN! Anything else is incompetent nonsense. Remember the unwritten rule of JavaScript when it comes to building a website:
If you cannot build a fully functional website without JavaScript FIRST, you likely have zero damned business adding scripting to it!
I've lost count of the number of bounce inducing sites that blocks a great many users from even using their bloody contact from because some wanker spanked it all over the form with JavaScript. Asshattery like Angular, React, jQuery and so forth being directly responsible for this move away from building simple clean accessible designs.
Remember, screen readers and braille readers don't do JS well if at all... and the number of people using plugins like NoScript, Ghostery, ScriptSafe and so forth grows as there is a continued increase in DISGUST amongst users over the BS incompetent scripting people are basically just pissing all over their websites with.
NOTE I said WEBSITES!!! There's nothing wrong with react.js if you're making full stack crapplets using something like nw.js, electron, etc, since being inherently JS powered they are already a giant middle finger to accessibility and rarely if ever are bandwidth bound.