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I think it's simply that (and this is from my memory only):

Node.js was THE first back-end JS thing, and its "micro" philosophy kind of set the precedent for everything else that follow in that space. It was the time when people started to feel Django/Rails are cumbersome for some of their needs, too, so the MVC approach never caught on for JS devs.

So I think it's just popularity. Pick whatever tool you deem suitable!

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At the start of node.js, I frequently saw full web applications written in it "traditionally", fetching data and writing it into pug/haml/jade/handlebars/whatever else templates (during the callback-pyramid-hell days). It was pretty much just another stack like a less opinionated django. People used express, returned HTML, etc.

Then the SPA frameworks came into the fray, and I never really saw node.js being used server side like that much anymore.

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