What does HackerNews think of framework?

If you compare it to a generalized Lamp stack, sure. Compare it to Laravel, and you have no solid basis for "code quality", worse readability, it's Fortune 100-levle-secure, future-maintenance -- Laravel is more active than any other community out there, and has significantly more tooling.

https://github.com/topics/framework

Laravel is not what it used to be either -- Laravel 5 is far more capable/usable than Rails or Django. It's ecosystem is vaster, much stronger community, better docs, faster -- pretty much every state it's better than it's competitors.

Not an end-all be-all, but worth noting: https://github.com/topics/framework

That is not true, it is the most started Node JS framework https://github.com/topics/framework

and very actively maintained.