Excellent question. The MEAN stack certainly doesn't seem to be badly oversold. It is, in fact, usually mentioned as being best-suited for specific types of applications, not as a general panacea.
Then there are the speed/performance tests, which seems to place MEAN at or near the top as compared to the other mainstream web app stacks, which begs the question: is it possible that snide comments about "concurrency" are utterly beside the point? Who cares if my hoopty car looks inelegant if it wins the race?
Well, winning races is nice, but so are things like scalability and reliability. These pages are no stranger to criticism of MongoDB's fault tolerance semantics, or the notorious difficulty it has scaling to sizes as small as, say, 100 gigabytes. Even aside from fault-tolerance concerns, mmap()'d linked lists of BSON documents and a few B-trees certainly have the potential to be a snazzy enough little foundation for some projects, but will only get you so far.
Good stuff. That's what I like. I've got a lot to learn, and it's better if I get real info and not empty rhetoric.
As simply a learning tool for someone who is immersed in a .NET + jQuery stack every day, how does MEAN compare? I disliked Rails, fwiw. And since I'm becoming reasonably fluent in JavaScript, it seemed intuitive that building my own site from the Node-ground up wouldn't be a bad idea, purely for a learning exercise. Struggling through it right now, actually.
Then there are the speed/performance tests, which seems to place MEAN at or near the top as compared to the other mainstream web app stacks, which begs the question: is it possible that snide comments about "concurrency" are utterly beside the point? Who cares if my hoopty car looks inelegant if it wins the race?