Avantgarde rather than niche I'd say. Helma, v8cgi and co. pioneered server-side JavaScript and around 2010 inspired CommonJS for portability, which Node.js be

Avantgarde rather than niche I'd say. Helma, v8cgi and co. pioneered server-side JavaScript and around 2010 inspired CommonJS for portability, which Node.js became the dominant implementation of. I believe Netscape's original web server product featured JavaScript as server-side scripting language back in 1995/6 already.