At this point I’d say node’s ecosystem of packages is an advantage, but its ecosystem of tooling is a disadvantage. It’s not node’s fault, but Javascript package management wasn’t a thing when it started out, and now we are still haunted by the legacy approaches of the past. I’ve wasted too many hours mucking with babel/webpack/tsconfig files just to get some stupid code to run.

If there’s any area of modern software development that could benefit from a clean slate like Deno is attempting, it’s JS development.