Java and PHP I could see as being similar to the Python as they all shared the pain of widespread adoption by vendors that were reluctant to update (Java: enterprise organisational internal, PHP4: bad cheap webhosts, Python2: everyone?).

With Node 0.12 though I don't see it. IOJS was a pretty momentary internal political issue that many users didn't even register on their radars. It certainly didn't have any long-lived impact on version adoption within the community.

And: the important point, they've all had very successful major bumps since. So even if there are pains, they can be overcome. There's nothing fundamentally un-doable about major version releases for open-source languages.