A static (serverless) website hosted on something like github pages or S3 paired with some API calls to an nodejs application running on a single core vm instance, both behind cloudflare, is also extremely cheap and should be able to easily beat php in terms of performance/costs ratio.
Yes you are right. There are a few really good frameworks like Gatsby and NEXT for building static websites since last few years. JS/NodeJS/TS development cost is also quite moderate and good.
JS ecosystem still lacks good reliable vendors and that holds some companies away from it. Surprisingly it's holding up really well even though must of the packages are maintained by individual contributors.
