> Requiring a novice to learn arcana of a 30 year old Unix system before they can learn to program is purely extraneous.

The thing is, that's the system they are using. Node.js is a programming runtime for that system. Node.js has a GUI installer that sets everything up correctly, it's just not an IDE.

Jetbrains has an IDE, WebStorm, that probably works just as well as the Java one. It can automatically download Node.js for you, so the same experience as for Java is available there as well.