For example:
>I'm sure every language has its success story(ies) along with a long list of failures.
is actually in your reply to:
>Some people like pretending that other languages don't have their own warts.
I don't think node is a bad platform. I think the language it's based on is terrible, and nobody who is willfully writing backend code in node has any real justification to complain about someone else's choice to use PHP.
If I misrepresented your stance, I apologize.
Shopify and Github are successful with Rails.
Stripe uses Ruby only.
Nodejs is a solid server runtime these days, widely test by big companies with big traffic as their frontend servers. And there is a mature option for static typing if you want that.