Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs because you have multiple objectives (e.g. high performance and loose coupling) and it's not possible to be optimal in all of them simultaneously. However, it is easily possible for a poor design to be way, way off the Pareto frontier and not particularly good at anything. So everything is a tradeoff, but things can still be bad or good.

That's not even meant to be a comment one way or the other on Javascript, although I will not voluntarily adopt node.js for server side application development.