The similar horrible things are the superficial warts related to dynamic typing and heavy usage by amateurs leading to poor code quality in the wild. However there's a big difference which is that Javascript has always had first-class functions, lexical scope, and object-oriented via prototypal inheritance. PHP attempted to bolt on some approximation of all of these over the years, but the result is a sort of Frankenstein shambler.

Javascript for all its problems at least was designed with a reasonably powerful core. That said, HN has plenty of terrible things to say about JS, so I think you're exaggerating a bit.