This benchmark mainly measures the performance of the HTTP parsing and database libraries, often in a suboptimal default configuration. In node land, they're admittedly not amazing, but nothing about the language prevents them from being better.
For example, for a long time, the only reason that node was slow on these benchmarks was the built-in URL parser. Replacing it with this carefully written module https://www.npmjs.com/package/fast-url-parser resulted in 2x improvements on the benchmark. I haven't looked closely at the situation nowadays but I imagine its still quite similar with lots of low hanging fruit lying around and stalled due to backward-compatibility concerns.
For proof find "es4x" in the benchmark list, which basically replaces the entire stack of HTTP parsing and database libraries with the ones from vert.x and runs JS on Graal, even though Graal is currently at least 2.5x slower than V8 in terms of JS performance: https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/issues/74
Node core (and the libraries around it) has unfortunately stalled in the "good enough" zone for quite a while. The good bit is that they stay in the good-enough zone after adding your own code.
