[wruza]

You’re likely blinded by a “nodejs monkey developer” stereotype which prevents you to see that node is what everyone wanted back then. It’s very, very easy to create an http-based analog of any “traditional” service in node and to free yourself from learning all the shady details (which there is a lot) of configuring it and keeping it alive at all levels, were it based on traditional software. Node is extensible configurable networking itself, and http(s) is a quintessence of all text protocols. All that we wanted back then is available now in node at much finer granularity and much less configuration or headache. “They” spin up home-grown services because it is a natural one-page-boilerplate straightforward thing to do in node, not because of ageism or something similar.

I tell you that as someone who fiddled with sendmail.cf’s and other .conf’s way too much long before nodejs became a thing. Now it’s a relief.