"Intensive enough" is a vague and fuzzy term which you can hide too much behind. So let me put it this way: Go grab Yaws, the Erlang web framework. Write a web page that goes into an infinite loop. Write some other web pages that work normally. Observe that visiting the infinite-loop web page once does not cause the rest of the web server to stop serving. Yaws may time it out eventually, too, not clear from a quick look at the docs. In fact it will only marginally decrease performance, even on single core machines.

Yes, if you bash on that page often enough you will eventually degrade service to an unacceptable level. But you will not bring down the whole server, or even that OS process, and it will take substantially more than one hit per process or one hit per core.

Now, go grab Node, and write a web page that goes into an infinite loop. You just brought that OS process down, from the user's point of view.

Node is qualitatively much easier to lock up an OS process with than Erlang. Or Haskell, or Go, or anything else with a modern task scheduler, which is an ever-increasing number of language platforms.