> For R&D and quick tests it is a very useful language feature to have IMO

Right, but unless you have an ftp server or quick ssh access and PHP isn’t doing any code caching that feature isn’t an advantage, how many developers are in that situation? Is this something you do?

If you’re running locally PHP spawns its own server which other runtimes have. If you’re running this on a server you’re most likely going to have app/code caching (apc Or opcache) switched on so you’ll need to restart the server anyway, in which case it’s not more advantageous than uploading a js file and restarting node.