I can't speak for the author, but I did a similar shift around 2010 to Node.js and JavaScript from many years in the Java ecosystem. I did try Groovy and quite

I can't speak for the author, but I did a similar shift around 2010 to Node.js and JavaScript from many years in the Java ecosystem. I did try Groovy and quite like(d) Scala before moving to JS, and while Scala at least was a big improvement at the language level, I eventually shifted further and further in Node.js because it simply was more productive and easier to make full stack webapps. I can see developer's points if they are just "backend developers", but doing anything with a web UI is vastly superior experience and simpler in Node.js.