Your final paragraph had a good point, though. It's not just cowsay.
(If you are a Lisp developer and you are reading this, I challenge you to build one in your favourite Lisp. Let's see how HN's favorite "secret weapon" fares against the entire ecosystem of JavaScript. The hypocrisy is unreal here, people would espouse Lisp in one breath and go back to coding their startup in Rails in another.)
But seriously. If you don't tell people politely and explain what and why it's wrong, they'll never know that what they're doing could be better. Just ranting and shaming might not be the best way. Still I agree with all the NodeJS hate.
What's wrong with having a rapid development ecosystem within which to build that is fairly simple to install, run, and cycle? JavaScript, and NodeJS by extension, are just as viable as languages as any other out there. There are languages, such as Rust or Go, that people tout their benefits. However, I see no simple way to get an env set up, learn the language, and turn around anything of meaning in the time I could in JavaScript. There are some deficiencies in the platform, surely, but those (as I would expect) get resolved over time.
I could make the same argument about having to get a JRE or a Python interpreter. Each language is going to have its deficiencies and bonuses.