alt Hacker NewsNot sure what the language has anything to do with it, we've built JavaScript applications within pulling in 100s of NPM packages before NPM was a thing, people and organizations can still do so today, without having to switch language, if they don't want to.
Does it require disciple and a project not run by developers who just learned program? You betcha.
I might say that every interpreter has a different minimum dependency level just to create a simple application. If we're talking about Node.js, there's a long list of dependencies by default.
So yes, in comparison, modern vanilla PHP with some level of developer discipline (as you mentioned) is actually quite suitable, but unfortunately not popular, for low-dependency development of web applications.