Yes I could imagine and I have experience of developing apis with "bugs" that you kind of need to keep since people come to depend on it working a certain way.

But I can't help to feel like Node is progressing kind of slow compared to other languages / tools. This is just a personal impression from a bystander who is not really into the actual progression though. I have a feeling that node used to push new features all the time but in last couple of years have stagnated somewhat. Stuff like imports etc is still not really here.

I understand that developing an api that has such huge userbase as node is a massive undertaking that probably has issues that I can't imagine but it doesn't really help me in my day-to-day experience with it.

I think some of it is because Node doesn’t have very many ways to let people know about potentially breaking changes. A compiler (like Elixir) has an opportunity to communicate potential breaking changes to the user before the program actually runs, and a static type system (like Rust) makes it easy to detect such broken code and reject it outright instead of silently changing behavior. It’s harder for Node: where would the diagnostic even go? The console? Some apps use Curses, so this will break them, and many of them send their own logs through something other than the console, so nobody’s actually watching it.

Node also isn’t actually a language, so there’s a lot of stuff that Node developers get in new version, but it’s actually being done in the V8 project.

Meh, the js/ts ecosystem breaks things all the time. At least 2 weeks ago you couldn’t run typescript with ts-node, unless you explicitly enabled highly experimental loader flags.

And this is no obscure corner case, ts-node is huge