The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.
My day gig is nodejs. I was interested in the problem space, didn't think too much about the stack. How bad could it be, right? Oops. The worst aspect of nodejs is code construction (craftsmanship). Whereas Bill Joy said of Java "Allows you to think both In The Big and In the Small, at the same time." With nodejs, not only is there no Right Way, there's not even a Good Way. You have to mind all the details, plus quit…
Instead, you'd rather the language be written with conscious land mines in it?
Like, I have a history of dunking on JavaScript. (Though, to be fair: ES6+ is better! It's a lot better. I kinda like it.) But C is unsafe as hell. The list of people who should be writing C is super short.
If you're running into memory links in Node, that points to bad native code or handles that are never getting removed. That's not something easier in C, unless you also like buying yourself double frees that you have to worry about. And backpressure is an architectural problem--it doesn't go away in another language, the ephemera of it just makes the problem surface in a different way.
Maybe what you're writing isn't appropriate for Node. Much of what I write isn't--if I start seeing buffers, I start reaching for another ecosystem, usually the JVM. But that's a far cry from a meaningful criticism of Node for what it's good at. Use what's good where it makes sense. Use other things where they make sense. Revisionism to have C make sense, in 2017, when we have modern, clean C++ and Rust both and Go if you really don't actually care about type systems, makes me really skeptical.