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Errrrr what? No, node.js became popular because it allowed the legions of front end devs to overnight become full stack devs without learning anything but a new framework. To a lesser extent it also provided an alternative to PHP in the "get a simple crud app up and running with minimal knowledge" space, but I think that's far dwarfed by the ability of front end devs to start leveraging their skills on the backend.

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There weren't really 'legions' of front end devs when node came out. People were just learning backbone.js and the idea of SPA's being viable was still forming. It was not easy to pick up if you were coming from something like rails, because it had no well documented complete framework solution. The people that were doing node in the early days were legit back end folks. I am now a front end developer, but I learned on rails and I remember having a hard time 'learning' node. It had no debugger (I was used to something like pry) and was generally a collection of 'low level' libraries.

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