In terms of early days serverside JS, I was mainly a Flusspferd user (outside of earlier Rhino & lots and lots of awkward XULRunnering), so I do get where you're coming from. Node was absolutely the mainstream enemy in the early days, and for me strongly represented the antithesis of what the ecosystem should become, including CommonJS.

But that battle was lost and at this stage Node realising late is so so much better than Node never realising at all.

It's also such a familiar story across ecosystems. Node gets all the flack because it's the browser-similar language platform and browsers have been where it's at for a long time (and will continue to be). That's neither a flaw nor an asset though - other ecosystems deal with very large (different) problems despite not having as many challenges to overcome as JS does.