my biggest fear in all this is the malware spreading around :/
Programming
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You never used Composer or the like and always built on bare code base? You never used libraries?
You can develop like that with nodejs and bun.sh as well. It's just quite tedious just like in php.
You've never had to do something outside of what is included in the PHP standard library? You've never used composer or included a third-party library?
You must dedicate a lot of time to writing things from scratch, things that are already solved (almost certainly better than you or I can ever do ourselves) and can be utilised by using a third-party library / module / package etc.
Node does take things to the extreme sometimes, but often packages are saving you hundred or thousands of hours a year, so you can focus on overall logic rather than creating an already existing tool for sending high-volume templated email, for example.