Comment by AgentME
12 hours ago
A lot of people don't realize NodeJS was made because the creator wanted to make a runtime dedicated to asynchronous IO, didn't want to use a language with a pre-existing standard library and ecosystem built around synchronous IO, and realized that JS almost uniquely fit the bill. It was not built for the purpose of letting people who only knew JS use JS on the server.
This tracks, cause the NodeJS website also doesn't mention anything about people already knowing JS. And imports worked completely differently between browser and Node, so they were pretty separate things at least at the start.