A lot of this is residual effects of the (slow) evolution of JavaScript. It was thrust into the spotlight missing a lot of features and these features have only

A lot of this is residual effects of the (slow) evolution of JavaScript. It was thrust into the spotlight missing a lot of features and these features have only recently been fixed by the language itself. But Node has been around since 2009. 2009 JavaScript was missing a lot of features. It was basically a runtime only advanced users should use. The Node maintainers had to make a lot of decisions that now conflict (to some degree) with fixes that have come later to the language. They chose their callback style; now we have Promises. They chose to throw in methods rather than return an error in the callback (this makes it awkward to use fs with Promises without a wrapper library). They chose to implement their version of CommonJS, now we have the .mjs issue arise.