Well I think PHP has fallen out of favor for Node among the "I wanna program" crowd. Of course this whole "social justice" shit-show is a more recent thing so all the heat is in that community, leaving PHP out of the festivities.
Well lately, everything seems to be focused on JS, no? There's node.js, react, angular, $JAVASCRIPT_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_DAY, ... So if JS is most of what you hear about, and if the community does actually have low entry standards, it seems logical that it'd be the community that would attract the most issues.