JavaScript, for better or for worse, like it or not, is here to stay. There is a ton of resources, by a huge community, and large corporations being thrown at improving it. This author needs to get off his high horse.
Not sure about the "niche" aspect of your comment, but Node is huge. The ability for a developer to work in the same language on both sides has been massive. The author is complaining that there is just too much JavaScript work out there. Someone must think it's pretty valuable. Let's face it, if you're not doing basically everything on the web at this point, you're not doing much, and that's where JavaScript reigns supreme.
Sorry, but this author is just the equivalent of an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn... but worse, it's not even his lawn, never was, and the "kids" are the ones who built his home over the last 15 years.
He looks out of date, out of touch, and unwilling to develop skills and knowledge.
"Node has been ... relegated to a web niche. ERP solutions ... aren’t using Node... don’t expect any serious shop to be washing their ... data through JS code...Fortune 500 shops aren’t basing their businesses on JavaScript ... JavaScript is intrinsically a dysfunctional language.... more flaws than any other programming language... JavaScript is wholly unsuitable for serious software... tens of thousands of lines of code ...difficult to ensure a specific level of quality..."
He's just ranting around. Even the "sources" are just scattered links to other rants of him...
Node isn't "killing it" anywhere, as far as I can see. It's a special-case technology being touted as competition for proper server-side languages, but in reality it is poorly-suited for the job.
There's no valid reason why most people should choose JS on the server instead of Ruby, Python, PHP, C# or Java, except that so many people know JS and so many people love shiny "cool" stuff. Node is a deeply flawed and very messy ecosystem.
I listed some reasonable questions just above this post, and I still don't have a good answer from anyone: what's the current list of apps these companies are running on Node, how special-case are they, how happy are these companies with their Node apps, how big a portion of their code bases are Node, etc?
I've seen some links to a few articles that date back 3-5 years, but nothing more current, and nothing very detailed at all. That list of companies you typed out is the same list of companies everybody always types out. I'm wondering about some actual details. I don't think that's unfair.
I'm not an employee of any of those companies (though the one I DO work for is moving to Elixir and Node away from Ruby) so I don't feel I should comment on that.
However they all are very active in the conference circuit (and on their engineering blogs) talking about their current work in Node.
Its not unfair to ask but not everyone can give you the kind of information you seek.