This was a really funny experience for me as a self-taught guy going in the other direction. I started with Node in my spare time, and when I finally got a professional coding job my first project involved Java and Maven. I was kind of dreading it due to Java's reputation as this big bloaty terrible enterprise language, but once I actually got started I was like, "Man, this type safety thing and opinionated build tool thing etc etc are really nice." By no means is it (or any language) perfect, but a lot of the criticism suddenly seemed really overblown.