Node is a phenomenal project, but it doesn't dictate the entire direction of the language. I have a hard time chastising TC39 for standardizing promises simply because Node developers didn't like the way it affected their core dumps. Like I said, JS is in a unique position as a language that runs on the server and in the browser. There are lots of stakeholders and not everyone is going to be happy, but I personally prefer promises over the callback hell we had before.
Your comments on Python:
> I'm aware that the python packaging story sucks. However there is broad awareness and strong desire to fix this.
Your comments on JS:
> There's been plenty of time to fix things
Python is one of the oldest programming languages that most engineers will likely ever work with. It was released the same year as Linux. Hasn't Python had "plenty of time to fix things"?
> The Python article you linked itself admits "expirienced people will know what to do, this is not for them".
First of all, the actual quote is "The people that will understand it’s not for them will self-exclude from the recommendations, as they should, since they know what to do anyway." The article also says the following: "I could not tag this as being “for beginners”, because it is not that simple. I know veterans that still struggle with this stuff".
But besides that, why in the world should you have to be an experienced engineer to figure out how to download and run packages of code from the internet? This is table stakes for most languages. You want third party JS frameworks to form a working group to establish interoperability before you'll grant the JS ecosystem your blessing, and yet you'll accept Python generally being bad at packaging code. You'll excuse anything when you're evaluating your favorite languages, but you nitpick when it comes to JS.
> For example, at some (relatively short) point in time around 2019/2020, react-native simply didn't work with pnpm
So you'll accept that the general Python packaging story is bad right now and has been for decades, and your only retort is that for an admittedly short period of time 3 or 4 years ago a single package supposedly had a bug related to pnpm (the least popular package manager)? Meanwhile the Python community is still debating how to install packages locally in a folder [1].
You don't think you're maybe contorting yourself to make some of these arguments work?
[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-582-python-local-packages-d...