In fairness the wheel has turned and node developers are seen as not respected. If you haven't moved to go/rust/serverless by 2018 the cool market has moved.
When I got started in 2000, php developers weren't as smart as perl developers. Then it was asp. No serious business would use php over asp. Java developers always had this attutiude but they were always treated as second class from c++ developers who were treated bad by c developers who were using a toy language compared to asm.
At some point 2006/2007 php became cool. But then the facebook movie came out and php was uncool again. Ruby on rails was better (unless you were twitter and wanted to scale). Then node. Go. Serverless.
PHP has always been anticool and looked down on. You need a strong sense of self to get involved.
As a fun, tongue-in-cheek project, someone should build a website with this timeline of languages going from cool to uncool.
For people who are busy with life and work, but who want to learn a new cool language, it would answer the question "what's the cool thing right now?". You look at the timeline, it's language X.
This also enables fun future oniony articles like "Go no longer cool", "Rust going the way of the dinosaur", "C++ is the new kid on the block", "Node.js is dead, long live X" etc.
When I got started in 2000, php developers weren't as smart as perl developers. Then it was asp. No serious business would use php over asp. Java developers always had this attutiude but they were always treated as second class from c++ developers who were treated bad by c developers who were using a toy language compared to asm.
At some point 2006/2007 php became cool. But then the facebook movie came out and php was uncool again. Ruby on rails was better (unless you were twitter and wanted to scale). Then node. Go. Serverless.
PHP has always been anticool and looked down on. You need a strong sense of self to get involved.