Agreed. JavaScript was actually my first language after TurboPascal in 1996.
I was also there listening to the first podcasts when node came out.
JavaScript is a very interesting language, especially with it's prototype memory model. And the eventloop apart from the language is interesting as well. And it's no coincidence Apple went as far as baking optimizations for JavaScript primitive operations into the M1 microcode.
But I still think multithreading is best done by using blocking operations.
NIO can be implemented on top of blocking IO as far as I know but not the other way round.
Also, sidenote, I think JavaScript's only real failure is the lack of a canonical module/import system. That error lead to countless re-implementations of buildsystems and tens of thousands of hours wasted debugging.