It's not completely true IMO for 2 reasons: 1- the nodejs standard lib is quite poor compared to say, Java's, Scala's or python's, so you generally need quite a lot of modules to do anything 2- the npm ecosystem is much more amateur. To do anything you have a ton of poorly supported by hobbyists or not supported at all modules. This can force you to change modules/libs regularly. This is to be compared to the Java ecosystem for example, were more people are working together to build well supported/high quality libs (Apache libraries for example)
Other issue is that things move fast and break, you are not sure that 3 months old tutorial will work in present.
Edit: I know I can and I did grabbed node and npm outside the repositories, but you do not see this issue with other languages where I must install latest stuff to get most libraries working.
It might've become the defacto standard for consuming them, but definitely not for creating them.
Almost no service I've ever administered used a nodejs backend.
Where as something like the Python community or Rust community (where I have had more experience) I have always found that even if there are packages that do the same thing, there usually aren’t nearly as many duplicates and often times the community has done a better job communicating the value of many of the packages. There is just less confusion around the whole thing
I have also found there to be relatively little overlap between the big packages, in my experience
I would never work on backend with JavaScript or any other interpreted language, due to error proness.
There is no connection, at all, between a language being interpreted and it being error-prone to write or run. You either mean something else or are mistaken.
I've seen third party dependencies churn on Elixir as well (packages that are no longer maintained or alternatives that are better) - I think it's an inherent problem with using dependencies and has nothing to do with the programming language in which those dependencies are written.
> As a developer I just want to get on with my work, not have to read another Hackernoon post on how everything from last week is obsolete because XYZ framework
My recommendation is that you don't read Hackernoon. This seems like a very ineffective way to level up your developer skills.
Edit: I agree that Elixir is very nice and would pick it over JavaScript for backend heavy applications without thinking. I just don't think this argument makes any sense in that context.