I'm surprised to see JS described as easier than Python. I'd say it's considerably harder and more complex. The first reason being that it forces you to think about asynchronosity constantly, and that's something a beginner's going to struggle with -- not just the idea that your code won't run in order, but that there are so many ways to deal with it (callbacks, promises, async/await, event emitters) all with their own tradeoffs. The second being that the standard library is anemic, so a ton of what you'd just hit the Python Stdlib for you have to either write yourself or sift through npm to find. Then there's the wildly varying code styles: this person/book encourages the traditional imperative style using loops and mutations, this other person encourages a functional style using folds and maps to do the same things. Prototype-based inheritance is less intuitive than class-based inheritance. There are multiple ways to do everything, even things as simple as variable assignment (var, let, const, implicit global, function foo() vs let foo = function() vs const foo = () =>), weird invisible things that trip you up like hoisting and how creating a global variable looks exactly the same as reassigning an existing local variable. New users will inevitably encounter the multiple competing module systems and either confuse syntax or fret about which to use.

I agree that it's cancerous, and that making the server side more accessible to front-end developers isn't worth all the problems Node introduces long-term. My dream is still a statically-typed version of Erlang.