I've never heard of people complaining of PHP being slow. They don't care, they just want to glue some HTML, CSS and JS together and run it on the browser easil

I've never heard of people complaining of PHP being slow. They don't care, they just want to glue some HTML, CSS and JS together and run it on the browser easily. So yes, simplify JS on the server to act like PHP and use node for servers and other stuff. Name it differently if you want so they don't call node slow. V8CGI is the closest to a deliciously simple JS implementation on the server I've seen. Take a look at it for some ideas.