[danShumway]

I use Node. I don't think Node is wildly better than anything else, but I'm used to it and it's good enough, at least for now. I'm unaware of any back-end language that forces dependencies to stay in the same language, but something probably exists somewhere.

I agree that node-gyp is a problem. It's possible to avoid, but can take some work (particularly when you start dealing with databases that basically have to be in compiled languages). The one saving grace is that if you have a set hardware that you're running on, you can sometimes vendor node-gyp dependencies. Unfortunately, that comes with some weird edge cases, and sometimes your dependencies break because your OS changes. I don't recommend it, but I understand that sometimes it's unavoidable.

I am hopeful that native WASM will solve some of these problems, but I don't know how realistic that hope is.