[Latty]

If I had to guess, I'd say Node is popular because the web has eaten the world, and if you already have a web app as the core of your development, it starts to make sense to make everything else just an extension of that, including your server so you can do things like server-side rendering.

A lot of that development seems to be TypeScript too, which helps mitigate a lot of the problems of raw JavaScript, and the structural typing makes working with JSON (something now pretty universal too) far easier than with a lot of languages.

There are a lot of things I hate about JavaScript itself, but TypeScript's type system is genuinely great.