That depends entirely on what you measure:

- Rapid application development

VB was easier and quicker

- GUI development

At least on Windows, in my opinion, VB is still the best language ever created for that. Borland had a good stab at it with their IDEs but nothing really came close to VB6 in terms of speed and ease of development.

Granted this isn't JS's fault, but CSS et al is just a mess in comparison.

- Cross-platform development

You have a point there. VB6 was a different era though.

- Type safety

VB6 wins here again

- Readability

This is admittedly subjective, but I personally don't find idiomatic node.js code all that readable. VB's ALGOL-inspired roots aren't for everyone but if I personally don't mind Begin/End blocks.

- Consistency

JS has so many weird edge cases. That's not to say that VB didn't have its own quirks. However they were less numerous in my experience.

Then you have inconsistencies between different JS implementations too.

- Concurrency

Both languages fail badly here. Yeah node has async/await but i personally hate that design and, ultimately, node.js is still single-threaded at its core. So while JS is technically better, it's still so bad that I cannot justify giving it the win here.

- Developer familiarity

JS is used by more people.

- Code longevity

Does this metric even deserve a rebuttal given the known problem of Javascript framework churn? You can't even recompile any sizable 2 year old Javascript projects without running into problems. Literally every other popular language trumps Javascript in that regard.

- Developer tooling

VB6 came with everything you needed and worked from the moment you finished the VB Visual Studio install.

With node.js you have a plethora of different moving parts you need to manually configure just to get started.

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I'm not suggesting people should write new software in VB. But it was unironically a good language for what it was designed for.

Node/JS isn't even a good language for its intended purpose. It's just a clusterfuck of an ecosystem. Even people who maintain core JS components know this -- which is what tooling is constantly being migrated to other languages like Rust and Go. And why some many people are creating businesses around their bespoke JS runtimes aiming to solve the issues that node.js create (and thus creating more problems due to ever-increasing numbers of "standards").

Literally the only redeemable factor of node.js is the network effect of everyone using it. But to me that feels more like Stockholm Syndrome than a ringing endorsement.

And if the best compliment you can give node.js is "it's better than this other ecosystem that died 2 decades ago" then you must realise yourself just how bad things really are.