There is a reason why NodeJS took off and was pretty much the prominent language on github before all the AI stuff with Python. Mind you this is pure JS, not even Typescript.
Processors and memory have gotten cheap enough were development speed matters more than compute cost.
IMO NodeJS popularity was expected. After all these years you still can't use anything other than JS on the frontend (WASM is still too green). So if you are going to master a language you might as well use it in the backend too.
NodeJS took off because V8 is insanely fast for interpreted language and you can use the same language for backend/frontend.