I don't think that node is bad, but it's simply another dependency you have to worry about. Most devs likely won't have node pre-installed. Having a no-dependency binary is a great thing.

The subsequent sentence suggests that the benefit is convenience of impromptu deployment:

> You can download a single binary, scp it to a far away machine, and expect it to work.

Because if you are not developing in node, and don't have any other node based software, yet another runtime, its package manager(s), and dependencies are unwanted additions to a system.

Node is great, and a port of jq to node would be awesome (someone once hinted at such a port, but I've lost track of it).

But jq also has libjq, a C library. And jq uses a copy-on-write, reference counted representation of JSON values, which is, for example, inherently thread-safe (though jq isn't using atomic operations for refcount management yet). The library is easy to use and powerful.

Ultimately the main thing I love about jq (and why I contribute to it) is the jq language itself. It reminds me of my one-time favorite, Icon. But in a world where C is still the champion of systems programming (until Rust takes over?), it's real handy to have a C JSON library _and_ a functional DSL that's easy to invoke from C.