It also made for a better title than "Confusion, Then Indifference, Slowly Turning Into Understanding & Affinity"
Also it's a reminder for Node.js developers to make good use of async patterns, lest their code look silly. Besides async, which Fenn mentions in the comments, there's EventEmitters and Backbone.js for doing different styles of async programming. And there are a few other libraries that are a lot like https://github.com/caolan/async .
Perhaps if your background is more on the lines of traditional server-side web development (ie. PHP, Django, Rails) then this is some new territory.
The difference is in what happened afterward. What I did then was to try to understand why Node.js did things differently and how I could accomplish my goals in an idiomatic way. I didn't try to shoe-horn in my existing mental framework for how things should work, and then throw my hands in the air when they didn't.
However, what I didn't do was immediately run to Alert the Internets about what "A Giant Step Backward" Node.js is.