The political question is whether they can attract via their politics the people who make the cold hard code.

Code hard code matters far more than politics to nodeJS consumers, but nodeJS producers may be influenced by politics.

You want to be the side that attracts the cold hard coders similarly to the way communists defected to the west during the cold war.

An important thing to note about that analogy is that defections to the West happened because the West was actually better, not merely more attractive on the surface.

Exactly, capitalists pay in cold hard cash. You can't buy a sports car if the state doesn't even allow them to be made.