What computations do you do in a webserver which hosts a REST API? Most of it is simple CRUD connected to a database, possibly with an auth layer on top, which is pretty much what you describe, passing IO through to a database and back.
Sure, JavaScript (and Ruby and Python) are usually fast enough with modern hardware - but we can't pretend there's no cost.
If my apps were that way, i could have replaced my team with 20 well-fed monkeys.
Does HN think putting 2-15KB JSON blobs in a Postgres DB running on Docker on a router is a good idea? Oh, and the table stores log data, so there's about 2 million rows after 5 days uptime. What do you think?
EDIT: This was not entirely related but it goes to the notion that it seems like a lot of myopic decision-making has somehow become even more acceptable and I would say this leads to dumb situations as above, and Node.