I always run node behind a NGINX reverse proxy. I also move your point about microservices for complex or repetitive tasks. CloudFlare workers are great for this and I use them all the time.

You should give PHP-FPM a look though. It’s basically a daemon form of PHP and combined with nginx it’s actually remarkably performant. That stack combined with laravel allow you to make some pretty hardcore APIs ( which is all laravel is good for lol).