Its not.

Its convenient for CIs, for deployment, for packaging, for running multiple versions. It's extremely simple to update (just replace the binary with another one).

Now, e.g. "just replacing one file with another" may not have convenience commands like "npm update". But its not hard.

My point is that a pre-compiled binary is extremely more convenient for *everyone involved in the delivery pipeline* including the end-user. Especially for delivering updates.

As someone who's packaged Javascript(node), Ruby, Go and rust tools in .debs, snap, rpms: packaging against a dynamic runtime (node, ruby, rvm etc) is a giant PIAS that will break on a significant amount of users' machines, and will probably break on everyones machine at some point. Whereas packaging that binary is as simple as it can get: most such packages need only one dependency that everyone and his dog already has: libc.