I think in your rage against nodejs and/or Mozilla, you forget the target audience of this tool. The tool is written and provided for and by web developers who write browser extensions. The extensions themselves are written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the web developers who do write extensions, unless they are first time web developers, for most parts have nodejs already installed on their machine. For them, installing and using web-ext is as easy as it is for you to pull down a binary and putting in $PATH, or installing a tool via your package manager.
I maybe wouldn't have written web-ext in js with nodejs myself, but I do understand why others would make the choice to do so.
Although I agree that the whole nodejs/npm ecosystem is just a insecure clusterfuck waiting to be properly exploited at this point. About the Mozilla objectives, I don't think they even know them themselves at this point, even less so around 2015 when this tool first appeared.
I maybe wouldn't have written web-ext in js with nodejs myself, but I do understand why others would make the choice to do so.
Although I agree that the whole nodejs/npm ecosystem is just a insecure clusterfuck waiting to be properly exploited at this point. About the Mozilla objectives, I don't think they even know them themselves at this point, even less so around 2015 when this tool first appeared.