One advantage of using browsers when you want "modern JavaScript (as supported by the most recent version of V8)" is that the fetch API provides a great opportu

One advantage of using browsers when you want "modern JavaScript (as supported by the most recent version of V8)" is that the fetch API provides a great opportunity to try out async/await, which is the most new language construct. You'll pick up destructuring assignment and optional chaining in minutes, but async/await will make you a better programmer in other languages too, once you get some practice with it. If you're dead set against browsers, you'll probably have to use deno since its API is friendlier to async/await than node's is.