Reading through this gentleman's blog post, it seems that, originally, Node was chosen for just one reason – he wanted to develop the entire application in JavaScript. Other than this, it does not seem that he took the time to research the Node development environment before deciding to develop his application in it.
With respect to the author of this post, the testing environment and the ease of developing a CRUD web application are things that should have been looked into before a single line of code intended for production had been written.
In addition to this, as several other commentators have already noted, Node is not directly comparable to Rails. Node is basically an event framework and standard library that bolts onto JavaScript. Node would be more comparable to something like Python's Twisted or Ruby's EventMachine. The author was probably using one of the frameworks available in Node such as Express.js, Railway.js, or Geddy.