"More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be

"More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be asynchronous or non-blocking in the first place. I also never figured why sometimes Node just silently ends without pointing my syntax error (and more importantly the line number)." This, so much. Even for moderately complex data workflows, 95% of the time what I needed to do was "execute a query or other IO operation, then do something with the result of that operation." But since js is async by default, I have to do extra work every time. Even if it's just a simple async/await declaration, there can be complications. Oh, your query failed with an exception so you want to do a rollback? Sorry, you lost scope to that db query when your promise was rejected. And don't even get me started on the stack traces, or lack thereof. If an exception was thrown inside a promise there's a 75% chance you're not getting anything useful out of that.