Yes, I talked with a few Python devs and they all envied the package management of Node.js.
Funny thing is, NPM is fun at the start, but in long running projects it's really bad. I mean, it feels like a huge step forward coming from PHP (where I didn't have any package manager back in the days) or Python (where pip seems to be a bit clunky) but it still could be better. Hopefully Yarn changes that.
Having the same language on front and backend is good for my own projects.
But it really is a problem on commercial projects I work on, because the people in charge tend to mix developers. I wouldn't consider myself a back-end developer, but was forced to write multiple APIs, because "it's just JavaScript, right?!"
The pros:
- programming the same language in the frontend and the backend (which becomes a big deal when you do serverside rendering of react components)
- for some reason AWS and Google App Engine have very good nodejs support
- very fast io
- very fast iteration time, faster than python
The cons:
- the lack of quality libraries and standards. With flask there are well known, well tested libraries for every use case. Not so with nodejs.
- javascript, which isn't really a big deal