Finally a true cross platform environment
A bit like 8086, a niche thing hacked together on the side of bigger shinier things, Javascript has outlived and outperformed its original purpose by several orders of magnitude. After many rigorously architected and robustly developed cross-platform programming environments (Java, .Net, Qt..., all of which are very nice in their own right, yet tend to miss one or two crucial environments in their portability lists) the most unlikely and uniersally hated candidate takes the throne. Today, Javascript is everywhere, on every user-facing OS, on every cloud platform, available headless on every major OS. And on a PC, quite interestingly, everyone gets a live scripting environment in the form of the bworser console, where one can actually program something - we users actually didn't have that luxury since the commonplace basic environment became obsolete as cheap data media replaced the need to type programs from listings printed in magazines. Sure, there has always been some ersatz, like bash or VBScript on Windows, but compared to the portability of JS and ease of use with Node, they were no match.
The language is different from what a common dev guy is used to (some time ago most devs were confused by the difference between prototypes and classes, and being used to the latter found the former difficult, stupid, incomprehensible) but quite powerful and very productive, once one understands how to use _not holding it wrong_.
I, for one, am thankful to those Apple and Google guys for giving us the V8 and to Node folks for giving us the thing we needed and wanted so badly, albeit in the form of a patched up thirty year old weekend project of one guy from Netscape. History shows us that quirky yet stubborn enthusiasm tends to win over thorough planning and robust execution.