I see. Web pages are easy. Programming is hard, but we can fix that simply by putting programs in web pages. Then we take that same syntax out of the web page and put it elsewhere, so that all programming is easy.

I don't think it works that way.

I understand your point. I started out as an embedded systems C developer. There are actually huge parallels between embedded work and nodejs.

One of the reasons is you can forget about all that nasty race condition stuff you get with threading in most high level languages. There are also no pointers or direct memory manipulation. Nodejs is pretty much asynchronous by design.

I think it really is harder to “shoot yourself in the foot” than using the oldguard method of developing backend systems.

Maybe this partly explains why it is at least plausible.

Moot point tbf, Java developers are a dime a dozen too, it's something they learn in school. JS wasn't taught yet back in my day.

The JS ecosystem does seem a lot more approachable though, you can just click through an installer and run a copy / past example, instead of a custom Java installer, IDE, configuration, Maven, all that stuff.