This headline is entirely false - 20% of Node modules use 'eval' or 'exec'. While these are certainly less secure and a strong secure coding standard would probably ban them or at least reduce their use, it's entirely possible to use both in safe ways.
As someone with almost 40 years of Lisp experience, I firmly believe that the only correct place to call 'eval' is in the implementation of a REPL. For any other purpose that you might be tempted to use it for, there is a better way, that is not only more correct but also faster. Usually, the better way is to pass a function to be called rather than an expression to be evaluated. There are more legitimate uses of 'ex…
Don't forget also: if you're reading uncompiled code from a file, that's an occasion for eval.