It reads to me, in one simple word, as "not Node, so you don't need tens of megabytes worth of node modules and you don't need a working C compiler in case some

It reads to me, in one simple word, as "not Node, so you don't need tens of megabytes worth of node modules and you don't need a working C compiler in case some of these modules want to compile stuff natively (something that is more and more common in my experience). Also, performance and startup time (!) will be good."