"past mistakes" are almost inevitable problems - I've been on both sides of this - creating things which likely caused someone else problems (learning to be better at tests and docs) - and inheriting problems created by someone see ( learning to demand better tests and docs from others when possible).

"past mistakes" have little to do with the language. Recently worked with a large Java codebase spanning back more than a decade. There's plenty of mistakes that have been made. And... there's plenty of 'language shortcomings' around Java too (go back to Java from 15 years ago, lots of shortcomings).

I was on a team that picked node for a project; the whole thing failed. Should I blame it on the language, or the people who made bad choices?

Perhaps the issue is mostly around people/teams that either aren't very good or more to the point don't have a structure in place to guide them and help them get better.