First thoughts:
- As a beginner you need to understand concepts first, all languages out there are great, each has it's own philosophy, each is better suited for a specific situation. Learn concepts first, do something, then you will understand the differences between them and why one should be chose over another for a task
- As a project manager you want your project to come to an end. You will get lost in all the different solutions out there (and it's good), but don't get lost too far. Very often I see people getting lost in those debates and never achieving things, like someone writing a book that would still be choosing the font 6 months after (we've all done that it's ok, but we have to realise it)
Chances are your project can be equally good on any different stacks. I heard an interview of someone from Uber who said something like they started with python, went to node, went back to python and went to go, and with micro-services now they can have all of them all-together.
Last remark: from what I know Laravel is a framework for PHP, so it IS PHP. Just like Symphony for PHP, Express for Node.js, Koa for Node.js, Flask for Python ...
Now to answer your question :
- PHP has a big community, it is great and easy to start with, and you will definitely will learn real object oriented structure
- Node.js has a big community too, don't worry finding help will be as easy. It is less easy to start with but in my point of view it is a lot easier to keep on going with it on a long run. Why ? Because it's very easy to run a new project, and it executes javascript. How is it good ? Because chances are that your front will also be using javascript (React.js / View.js are crazy good). Thanks to that you will be able to master the language better because you will use it all day (and at first mastering one language is more valuable than barely knowing two) and you won't have to switch languages in your head when you code. And communication between front and back will be in json ... Which is crazy close to javascript.
Alexander is right, if you go with PHP take your time first to do things by yourself like building your own MVC, the benefit is huge and the risk is to never really be able to understand what's happening on a deeper level. (at some point you can switch to a framework though). He's also right on choosing a strongly typed language, problem is javascript is not. This is why, if you choose node, when you start being confident, add typesccript.
Hope it helps, good luck
