It's super cool for people wanting to do node on Windows. I used the beta while doing a small side project at my last job, and they worked well for that project.

My issue isn't necessarily azure and VS. It's the state of node on Windows. It's a second class citizen compared to the versions for posix compliant OSes. There are things that just don't work on Windows without installing VS, which is undesirable for deployment, and that's assuming they work even after VS is installed.

I'd rather spin up a local Ubuntu VM and write code in WebStorm, and that's what I do. I get debugger support, test runners, code completion, etc. Plus, I can then just deploy to cheaper VPS providers (DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc).