I did one rails project a number of years back. When I had to learn NodeJS it wasn't that surprising because so many things in Node borrowed ideas from Rails (and part of why the module ecosystem developed so fast).
From what I recall from Rails developers, you end up having to focusing early on removing duplicated effort from the system, whereas Node seems to be just enough faster that nobody worries about it.
The project I'm working on should be able to run with a third of the hardware and a quarter of the round trip requests to the server room, but it's fast enough that they just keep doing CPU intensive work instead of calculating subsets of the data ahead of time.
And once you start down that route you find the spaghetti has gotten pretty challenging, and weird little requirements that are super-expensive to implement have snuck in. It's hard to walk these things back.
