The original dream for Node was that it would simply be a glue wrapper around libuv that allowed for easy packaging/sharing of modules written in C++. But everyone just started writing everything in JS, and the ecosystem ended up as a mish-mash of native/non-native. Ryan Dahl stated this was indeed his biggest mistake/regret with Node, thus we have Deno now.
Because the native written stuff breaks all the darn time and it creates cross-plat nightmares.
My stress levels are inversely proportional to how many native packages I have to try to get building within a project, be that project in Python, Java, or JS.
JS+Node runs on everything. Prepackaged C++ libraries always seem to be missing at least one target platform that I need!
But even a great build system doesn't help when old native libraries don't support newer hardware or OSs. At some point the high level -> native abstractions break and then builds break. :(
It's considered ... rude ... in most cases to write a module that needs to build against a native library without also having an Alien dist to handle making sure said library is there by the time it's trying to build against it.
Opinions on perl as a *language* ... vary, let us say ... but I wish people who didn't like writing perl would at least look at how our infrastructure works and steal more of the good parts to make dealing with their preferred language less painful.