Was in the same boat (regarding the Javascript ecosystem) until I discovered NextJS. It's pretty opinionated, but lets me get fully functional React sites up an

Was in the same boat (regarding the Javascript ecosystem) until I discovered NextJS. It's pretty opinionated, but lets me get fully functional React sites up and running in with sensible defaults in minutes. Not exactly as clean as PHP, but for quick projects, it's removes a substantial amount of overhead.