Comment by pdeuchler

Errrrr what? No, node.js became popular because it allowed the legions of front end devs to overnight become full stack devs without learning anything but a new framework. To a lesser extent it also provided an alternative to PHP in the "get a simple crud app up and running with minimal knowledge" space, but I think that's far dwarfed by the ability of front end devs to start leveraging their skills on the backend.