I wasn't saying that people use it because they have to. There are a lot of reasons to use Node on the server side that are still unrelated to the quality of JavaScript as a language.
1) Easy asynchronous execution (something that is also making Go very popular)
2) Easy to get started
3) Lots of existing libraries
4) Everyone, including frontend devs, knows it already
If you're starting a Python project, you're probably going to prefer hiring Python devs. If you're starting a Node project, you can hire anyone who has done full-stack or frontend work, including Ruby and PHP devs.
Again, all of those are really compelling reasons to use Node, but they have nothing to do with the way JavaScript is designed. The seminal JavaScript book ("The Good Parts") even alludes to the fact that it's not a thoroughly good language.
Further evidence that it's not a good language are the huge number of compile-to-JavaScript projects popping up (TypeScript and Go come to mind).
I also went to a JavaScript conference, and not a single company was using Node through their whole stack, even for new projects. They were typically using Ruby, Python, or PHP for the bulk of their backend, and JavaScript was a thin API layer. I know this is also the case at Yahoo and probably some other companies.
I could write a lot about why I (and lots of others in the dev community) find JavaScript to be Blub-y and fragile, but this is long enough already. The dynamic typing and many ways it behaves unexpectedly are among the major problems.
And that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
The statement "Most of us use it because we have to" is pretty clearly refuted by the fact that no one had to use JS on the server-side, yet plenty still pick Node over other alternatives (even ones they know well).