First you are mixing clientside and serverside development libs which are not the same thing. I believe there is little reason to use nodejs on the server. Yea

First you are mixing clientside and serverside development libs which are not the same thing. I believe there is little reason to use nodejs on the server. Yeah,it 'scales' , but so does the JVM or go. And frankly async programming the nodejs way sucks,even with promises or generators ,since there is no way to abstract asynchronicity 100%. If you eleminate all the serverside tools, then you only need a framework (AngularJS for instance) and a testrunner ( like Jasmine,you can even run it on the browser directly). You might need a tool to minify code, but gzip compression,a cdn and caching are often enough to reduce the load.