I mean, if I had been doing PHP-only professionally for years and then as an alternative merely checked out NodeJS, I wouldn't budge either, I think. But NodeJS

I mean, if I had been doing PHP-only professionally for years and then as an alternative merely checked out NodeJS, I wouldn't budge either, I think. But NodeJS is not known to be an elegant, fascinating or even horizon expanding language. None of that. So I am not surprised. Additionally it is kind of in the same language family as PHP is (while there are differences). Add to that all the overhead you have with minifiers, bundlers and whatnot, and I can understand easily, how one would not want to switch to NodeJS coming from PHP. However, it might be a good idea to try languages, that are encouraging different paradigms, belong to another family of programming languages, or are often used for other things than PHP usually is. Try a Haskell, try an Erlang, an Elixir, a Scheme/Racket, a Rust. Languages so significantly different, that they add value for your learning experience as well as enabling you to do new things and get to know elegance in programming language design.