Thus Heroku.
It's just simple for you, because it places you in an actual end user role. (Which you pay for).
Heroku is no doubt complicated as hell for the people who developed it. So if the argument is that developing node.js should have been like deploying to a paid managed hosting environment with fairly tight requirements, then ok. But that's a weird thing to assert.
And I'd say that if all you want to do is deploy a rack app, you can do that relatively simply in Debian too, for free. (I'd do it with rvm and perhaps build nginx from source and such, but you could do 90% of it straight from apt-get, rubygems and editing ~three config files).
The sorts of things that are really tricky, and have you sweating over the sorts of things the original post is complaining about, are just hard original work (and free, and you don't have to wait years for them to support your pet language or framework or whatever).
It's an acceptable trade-off, an issue internal to the concerns of developers - not end users, and not a reason to hate on unix, is all I'm saying. Not at all hating on the service Heroku provides.