Node has felt fine to me for quite awhile. There was a brief time where it felt a little slow comparatively but it's been mostly ironed out. They tend to address their problems decently fast.
The Internet loves to adopt a new shiny thing, try to convince everybody else it's the right decision because it's the decision they made, and then get quiet about it. (i.e. they went back.)
I've been working on a full-stack JS framework since 2021 (was oss; went private earlier this year) and still remember being asked "are you going to use <Deno|Bun> for this?" My answer was "no" and the why is exactly what you've said here.
All of the drama around Node was just that...drama. It works great, anecdotally keeps getting better, and while it definitely has shortcomings compared to Deno/Bun, I can at least trust that it isn't going away or mere months away from a pivot to curry favor.
I look at Deno/Bun as more supplemental, as-needed tools. I think the best Deno application I saw was on Bunny CDN's custom edge scripting. It was really nice to just hack together a script and know that it was going to pull and cache deps without me having to manage a dev environment. It also just worked out of the box.
Rambling, but I dunno. I kind of wish Ryan Dahl would move back to Node, bringing the wisdom and lessons from his Deno work.
What kills me about Node is the org. They've controlled the Node binary for how many years now ... and for that entire time they have chosen a config format that sucks (JSON with no comments).
WHAT ENGINEER WORTH THEIR SALT DOES NOT WANT TO COMMENT THE CENTRAL CONFIGURATION FILE OF THEIR ENTIRE PROJECT?
You can have comments. If you are talking about the package.json file just create a new property named after your project and put whatever string you want in there.
It’s good to inform people that this hack exists and can work for some situations, but no, that’s not “having comments”. Not even close.
What makes that a hack?
That's a workaround, not a comment.