[lsdafjklsd]

There weren't really 'legions' of front end devs when node came out. People were just learning backbone.js and the idea of SPA's being viable was still forming. It was not easy to pick up if you were coming from something like rails, because it had no well documented complete framework solution. The people that were doing node in the early days were legit back end folks. I am now a front end developer, but I learned on rails and I remember having a hard time 'learning' node. It had no debugger (I was used to something like pry) and was generally a collection of 'low level' libraries.