The actor model deals with concurrent computation.

The threading models on node and browsers do not allow concurrent computation, except for the case of web workers, and the proposed threading additions of JavaScriptCore.

Because of this, the actor model can be overkill when you have no threads. More specifically, you may introduce queuing where no queuing (or other type of synchronization) is necessary. This is because an actor is basically a worker with a work queue (aka mailbox).

For the most part promises can solve most of your async issues. Event emitting/message passing is valuable, but queuing is optional in many cases.