The problem was the hype. It was hyped as a silver bullet, and we even have issues like people who have drunk too much Node Kool-Aid thinking that Node has the absolute best multithreading solution, and anything else that doesn't work exactly like Node is therefore worse, when Node in fact merely has a polished-but-old-school approach to the problem.

If people are upset that Node isn't a silver bullet, it's because the Node community never worried too much about making sure that people knew it wasn't one. It's why I've been saying that when I actually come onto HN here and try to puncture the hype, I'm actually doing Node a favor, by calibrating expectations closer to reality.

Node isn't useless, but the problems with the Node approach are well-understood since it's an approach the greater programming community has about 20 years of experience with, as are the potential workarounds, and even just how far the workarounds can be taken before you run into problems with the fact the underlying language is only so powerful. This sort of event-based approach just intrinsically scales poorly as program size increases, even with all the grease and goop you can muster up in a language that has closures.