> Yeah, it does kinda feel like amateur hour.

NodeJS is intended for IO-heavy workloads. Specifically, it's intended for workloads that don't benefit from parallel processing in the CPU.

This is because Javascript is strictly a single-threaded language; IE, it doesn't support shared access to memory from multiple threads. (And this is because Javascript was written for controlling a UI, and historically UI is all handled on a single thread.)

If you need true multithreading, there are plenty of languages that support it. Either you picked the wrong language, or you might want to consider creating a library in another language and calling into it from NodeJS.