I don't see it as virtue-signaling but I do think there are three distinct JS communities, even if they overlap a lot, and sometimes they take swipes at each other. Maybe someone can point out more? The three I'm thinking of are 1) the classic webmaster group, aimed at building dynamic and interactive websites 2) the SPA group, making webapps, also extending into things like React-Native, but the web is just a delivery medium for their app 3) the backend group with Node, aiming at the types of things you'd otherwise have used PHP/Ruby/Python for.