While I can see some arguments for "we need good tools like Node so that we can more easily write actual applications that solve actual business problems", this seems to me to be the opposite.
All I should ever have to do to import a bunch of functions from a file is
"import * from './path'"
anything more than that is a solution in search of a problem
Feels unrelated to the article though.
Hopefully this helps! :D
That also happens automatically, it is abstracted away from the users of streams.
Streams can be piped, split, joined etc. You can do all these things with arrays but you'll be doing a lot of bookkeeping yourself. Also streams have backpressure signalling
Manually managing memory is in fact almost always better than what we are given in node and java and so on. We succeed as a society in spite of this, not because of this.
There is some diminishing point of returns, say like, the difference between virtual and physical memory addressing, but even then it is extremely valuable to know what is happening, so that when your magical astronaut code doesn't work on an SGI, now we know why.