Yup. Node.js isn't quite as old as you make it out to be, there were plenty of mature tech stacks out there with PHP/Perl, Ruby, C#, etc. Many of them perfectl

Yup. Node.js isn't quite as old as you make it out to be, there were plenty of mature tech stacks out there with PHP/Perl, Ruby, C#, etc. Many of them perfectly fine to work with. Node.js came along with a very different conceptualization of scalability relative to other web-servers, and that was what drew people to it. Today we have things like varnish, nginx, fast-cgi, etc. as well as much faster servers which make it a lot easier to scale out web stuff without having to redesign it from the ground-up, but node.js was for its time a hugely advantageous way to approach scaling. And it still is for many use cases, but today it's matured into something that has a lot more to offer.