No, we ran into the same issues. When dealing with mid-sized Node.js projects in particular where the dependency tree may include something like 70k source files. `npm install` can take several minutes, builds on-save could take several seconds. We resolved to simply doing everything inside of a VM, using sshfs to "persist" the data out to the host machine on-demand for those uncomfortable using vim/tmux inside the VM.
I really don't think so. You might just be underestimating the number of static asset files in a client-heavy web app before concat/minify ever happens. Watching the logs, you could see... each... little... file... take... way too long.