Well, compared to a shell script or a static binary...the Node example requires you to have Node (+ NPM) on your machine and, unless you wrap it all up for homebrew/apt/some other package repo. you're going to be using `npm install -g` to use it as opposed to shoving an executable into your PATH.

All of your stated benefits are nice for the maintainer but mean little to the end user. This gushing praise for Node reads like nobody has ever built elegant CLI apps until Ryan Dahl turned of age and put JS on a server.