Coming from a Java environment, I can't agree enough... A lot of my fellow devs would think of NodeJS as a replacement for Ruby--inefficient and not production ready.

When I first tried NodeJS, I was hooked... You can build simple CRUD backend APIs within minutes! I'm aware you can do the same with Java, e.g. something like Spring Boot streamlines the process a ton as well, but the feedback loop of just writing a line or two and having a server automatically reload within seconds is amazingly addicting.

I am not sure I would use Node for production... I suspect a lot of the Java world might switch to Go as being much faster yet much safer than something like Node.