I disagree with the others, and think this is indeed simple enough without caveats about setting it up (setting up WAMP is honestly just as much effort — not much), and what I’ve used to teach friends who wanted to learn some web programming with zero initial understanding.

Explaining routes and handlers was a bit hard, compared to files. I wonder if there’s a “file based” version for Node that’d work like and express handler for the files route?

For what it's worth, I agree with you. I associate installing node and installing LAMP/WAMP with similar levels of "difficulty."

Sure, `http.createServer` is a few more lines of code compared to the equivalent PHP `hello world` but I don't see it as an insurmountable hurdle.

Simple, yes, but managing a MEAN stack (or even just Node + Express) is far from being "easy".

Simple, except for the Javascript and npm bits...