It is indeed mind boggling when people list async (read: callback hell) as a feature. Complex systems rapidly get unmanageable, so people build nasty hacks to

It is indeed mind boggling when people list async (read: callback hell) as a feature. Complex systems rapidly get unmanageable, so people build nasty hacks to try to paper over the async core (it is still async single threaded at its core, run a dumb busy loop and watch your app stop responding). Blocking is a feature. Blocking lets you reason easily, and as Go, Erlang, etc... have proven can be done at breathtaking speed and use all your cores... rather than wrapping your world view around async, use a system that allows you to keep your logic blocking and uses microprocesses to distribute work across a pool of threads. It is freeing to be able to just kick up 300k microprocesses if you need them. Additionally, the node ecosystem tends to be quantity over quality... many of the available modules are simply more trouble than they are worth... while NPM makes getting them easy, it doesn't make deciding if something is worth using any easier.