I am not - and have never been - a front-end or browser JS developer. I did not have JS skills to bring over, and yet Node was my preferred language for writing

I am not - and have never been - a front-end or browser JS developer. I did not have JS skills to bring over, and yet Node was my preferred language for writing commercial applications for many years. Now more on the Go side, but still making plenty of Node applications. It works fantastically well in IO-bound applications for such a large number of reasons. It's not far off the most lightweight option for making simple systems, the ecosystem focusses very much on composition of smaller libs than using hefty frameworks, its single threaded nature is actually a _huge_ benefit (though you wouldn't want to use it for CPU-bound work). There's also the fact that JS these days is essentially a completely different language from the JS which browsers supported 5 years ago. I started using Node before those changes, but it has only become better with them. I think you'd be surprised how common this exact story is. A lot of Node engineers are gradually moving over to Go, but it's still a great system in its own right. Also, in reality, if you're a pre-existing browser JS developer, you're actually going to be bringing a load of baggage which will not help you get used to Node. I'd almost say you're better moving to it if you don't already know the lang.