Javascript is a flexible and fluid language in my opinion. Using modern JITs gets you a scripting language that is many times faster than other languages, but Node.js itself is based around async callbacks for the simplest stuff with no easy way out, which makes it worth avoiding.

Lua JIT however is sane, simple and even faster, but the infrastructure and tools surrounding it are bare in comparison.

"but Node.js itself is based around async callbacks for the simplest stuff with no easy way out, which makes it worth avoiding".

Huh? Async code is so powerful. You can use promises instead of callbacks. And you can easily make a async call "synchronous" by adding the await keyword in front of it.

It's not that other languages don't have async code...they just do it using multiple threads or other patterns that are nicer to work with than JS.