[flagged]
The people ripping into js suck up the interesting energies, and bring nothing of value.
We are discussing tech where having a custom userland TCP stack is not just a viable option but nearly a requirement and you are talking about using a lighter JS framework. We are not having the same conversation. I highly recommend you get off Dunning-Kruger mountain by writing even a basic network server using a systems language to learn something new and interesting. It is more effort than flaming on a forum but much more instructive.
Libuv isn't the most perfect networking stack in the planet, no. It could be improved. We could figure out new ways to get io-uring or some eBPF based or even dpdk bypass userland stack running. Being JS does not limit what you do for networking, in any way. At all. It adds some overhead to the techniques you choose, requires some glue layer. So yes, some cpu and memory efficiency losses. And we can debate whether thats 20% or 50% or more. Techempower shows it's half an order of magnitude worse (10^0.5, 33%). Techempower is a decent proxy for what is available, what you get, without being extremely finicky.
Maybe that is the goal, maybe this really is a shoot for the moon effort where you abandon all existing work to get extreme performance, as c10k was, but that makes the entire lesson not actually useful or practical for almost everyone. And if you want to argue against techempower being a proxy for others, for doing extreme work & what is possible at the limit, you have to consider a more extreme js networking than what comes out of box in node.js or Deno too, into a custom engine there too.
It's serious sad cope to pretend like it's totally different domains, that js is inherently never going to have good networking, that it can't leverage the same networking techniques you are trying to vaunt over js. The language just isn't that important, the orders of magnitude (<<1 according to the only data/evidence in this thread) are not actually super significant.
It was an incredible era that brought amazing aliveness to the internet. Most of it was pretty simple & direct, would be more intelligible to folks today than today would be intelligible & legible to folks from them.
This behavior is bad & deserves censure. The hacker spirit is free to be critical, but in ways that expand comprehension & understanding. To classify a whole era as a "horrible hack" is injurous to the hacker spirit.