I can't think of any technical, risk-related, or financial justification for implementing a core piece of crypto-currency infrastructure in Javascript, on Node.
It seems fairly clear that while Bitcoin itself may be a very well designed crypto protocol, the people doing the implementation are woefully underqualified.
You don't get static typing with nodejs, but you can probably simplify the implementation somewhat by not dealing with low level details and therefore actually get some safety. But aside form that justification there is also the fact that a lot of people won't touch C++ and a code base like this allows a lot more developers to read and understand the protocol.
I guess the ideal implementation would be a modern statically typed language like Rust, Go, or Haskell.
So kudos to Satoshi whoever he is for this..
Javascript: the new native.