TL;DR: We evaluated Node.js ecosystems (Prisma, TypeORM) but found they struggle violently with dynamic polymorphism. We chose Laravel and PHP 8 to get a mature ORM and a "batteries included" enterprise ecosystem.
The JavaScript Obsession
The headless CMS space is completely saturated with Node.js and React. If you want funding right now, you build your backend in TypeScript. When we started StakCMS, we looked closely at Prisma and TypeORM.
We rejected them. We chose PHP 8 and Laravel instead.
The ORM Dealbreaker
Here is the honest reason: Prisma struggles violently with deeply nested polymorphic mutations. Our ContentBlock architecture relies entirely on dynamic polymorphism to link structured JSON schemas to arbitrary pages. Doing this in Node often forces you down into raw SQL to avoid massive N+1 bottlenecks.
Laravel’s Eloquent ORM handles polymorphic relationships flawlessly out of the box. More importantly, we didn’t want to spend our first six months stitching together a franken-stack of express, bullmq, multer, and nodemailer.
Batteries Included
Laravel gives us a battle-tested queue (Illuminate\Queue) and filesystem abstraction (Illuminate\Filesystem) by default. We didn't have to reinvent background jobs; we just wrote them.
Does Node have better cold-start times for serverless edge functions? Yes. But for a stateful CMS application processing thousands of concurrent API reads and queued webhook dispatches, PHP 8 with OPcache and Laravel Octane easily competes with Express, and gives us a significantly more resilient data model.