We’re a .net shop, like half the country I live in, but I could’ve written a somewhat similar story as the author. Not exactly similar, I don’t think NPM is really better than maven or nuget and coming from .net, the IDEs for JS are certainly weaker than they are for .Net.
The reason we’re doing more and more JS, and using node, is because of how fast it produces stuff that works.
It’s simply faster to write the same functionality with JS and node than it is in .net, and it gives us the advantage of only using one language for back-end, front-end and mobile. Which is extremely useful for a small team in an enterprise setup.
It also works everywhere. We’re a .net shop like I said, that means we run on IIS, which can be done with other techs than .net through stuff like fastcgi, but have you ever tried setting that up and keeping it up-to-date? I have, and really showed me how little of an operations guy I am because it was horrible. IIS-node on the other hand worked out the box.
It’s a little ironic, but it’s now easier for us to deploy Node apps than .net apps because .net apps often need different configuration on the IIS than it does on your development box and Node works exactly the same.
It’s mostly the easy, fast part that does it for us though, and not so much the language or node itself. We’re simply more productive when we’re using Node.
Of course you need a lot of governance with the JS stack, but you honestly need that for any tech, and we already had pretty strict rules in place for how we write things in .net.
Disclaimer, it’s entirely possible that we are not as good at .net as we think. It’s also possible that I’m noticing Node in more places than I did in 2012, or 2016 for that matter, places because I’m more focused on it now that we use it in production. Node is a rising trend throughout my network though, with more and more people picking it up for stuff that isn’t just weekend projects.