Not from what I've seen, after hosting a bunch of NodeJS based web-apps I can tell you it doesn't perform well on the server-side or on the desktop. It's a decent rapid prototyping language / tool - but it's taking what should (or perhaps shouldn't) be in a web browser, wrapping it up and hosting it somewhere that the designers of products often don't know much about the landscape.
For the majority of users, it performs well enough. Step out from behind your own lens. For instance, the number of times I've heard someone complain about Slack's performance (that isn't a developer) is precisely zero.
You are right. It's good enough for many apps. I probably have several nodejs/electron/js desktop apps running and I have no complaints. It is the most cost effective way to target multiple platforms and the development experience is fantastic without having to get into .net win forms or xaml/wpf on Windows or the monstrosity that is Xcode/UI builder or God forbid Java or the worst Dev ecosystem that is android/eclipse.
So let's be practical here. If I am doing a startup or a side projects I am definitely going with JavaScript on the client - I have more freedom on the server and will probably pick either elixir/Phoenix, rails or .net
I think my lens is actually quite large, I have 15 years of production experience hosting, building, deploying applications and build pipelines, currently I'm working across 20~ end user facing products in their various application life cycles, backed by hundreds of services running across many hundreds of instances. They scale from applications that turn over only 3-5RPM up to 8000 RPM throughout the day. We host and deploy Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, JS, Erlang, Go and Java apps. I can say without a doubt that the JS (in our case NodeJS) apps are by far the worst to work with, not just in regards to performance but also in regards to community quality.
This is biased hokey.
JavaScript is very fast for what it's built to do, and it keeps getting faster and used for more applications.
Another problem is many JavaScript programmers actually don't know how the language works. They think they know how to use it because the barrier to entry is so low.
It is long past time that people start recognizing JavaScript as a real language and not some browser add on.
