[Anagmate]

I feel like a large part of the negativity around Node.js comes from the callback hell and almost everything being async.

Solution to these two problems (an ingenious one I think) is async/await (and there is an awesome polyfill on npm) - if you want, you can enclose your whole code in one async block and effectively make everything synchronous. Or you use it to its full potential and remain synchronous in all parts of the code that need it while retaining the benefits of async (other parts of code can run while the current one is waiting for a result.

The only caveat I've encourtered (a manageable one, at least for me) is that you must keep in mind that the underlying code IS async, so you can only guarantee synchronous behaviour in the single asynced block od code - so sometimes, race conditions could happen between some parts of your program, but with proper scoping (and ideally, using pure functions), you can avoid it all together.