The question is how often you get bitten in the ass by it, specifically as a professional rather than a beginner, and in my experience it's been very little with Javascript but quite often with PHP. Once you know a few things like the difference between == and ===, that undefined and null are different, etc., it's pretty easy to avoid the warts because the warts become obvious. I'm not going to argue that Javascript is well designed, it's really not, just that I rarely if ever run into the typical laundry list of gripes in such a way that it has a profound effect on my job.
And having ESLint backing me up doesn't hurt, either. But that's not technically relevant.
PHP, especially the older versions, contained many subtle traps you could easily fall into. For all of its flaws, I've never really felt the same about Javascript. More to the point, beginners are always going to stumble. It comes with the territory. I tend to focus my criticisms more on problems that knowledgeable programmers can stumble into accidentally rather than ones that are commonly met by new programmers, if that makes sense. The former seems like a far worse problem, because the former starts to touch (bear with me) "real" code.
Just as an aside, the biggest single pain point for me when I still used PHP (a lifetime ago, now) was the way PHP used to report missing quotes extremely inaccurately. Egads that was an awful bug. I hope they fixed that.
What it boils down to in my mind is, when I'm writing JS, I'm comfortable not having a linter available. I don't always feel the same way with PHP, because I don't feel like the traps are as easily avoided. I certainly don't think I'm some sort of Javascript guru, it's just that I don't have many problems with it in a purely practical sense when compared to PHP.
