We can provide better visual feedback that loading is taking place
I'm not so sure about that... IMO, so many single-page apps get this wrong. The native browser loading indicator is still a lot better than many SPAs, and unfortunately it's something that can't be triggered from JS (apart from ugly hacks like infinitely-loading iframes)
With the advent of Node, that changed. The fact that we can do server-side rendering and communicate with databases and what-have-you using a language native to the web is a wonderful development.
Server-side JS was a thing looooong before Node. I remember using Microsoft's version of JavaScript ("JScript") server-side via Classic ASP in the early 2000s. The issue back then was that JavaScript just wasn't quite that popular yet. ES5 wasn't around yet (it was all ES3), and there was a lack of good third-party libraries. But still, it was absolutely in use long before Node even existed.
What Node did do was cross-platform support, introduce a module system (CommonJS) as standard, and introduced the concept of easily obtaining third-party packages via "npm", taking ideas from similar systems like Perl's CPAN.
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I'm not so sure about that... IMO, so many single-page apps get this wrong. The native browser loading indicator is still a lot better than many SPAs, and unfortunately it's something that can't be triggered from JS (apart from ugly hacks like infinitely-loading iframes)
Server-side JS was a thing looooong before Node. I remember using Microsoft's version of JavaScript ("JScript") server-side via Classic ASP in the early 2000s. The issue back then was that JavaScript just wasn't quite that popular yet. ES5 wasn't around yet (it was all ES3), and there was a lack of good third-party libraries. But still, it was absolutely in use long before Node even existed.
What Node did do was cross-platform support, introduce a module system (CommonJS) as standard, and introduced the concept of easily obtaining third-party packages via "npm", taking ideas from similar systems like Perl's CPAN.