JavaScript was never designed for non-browser usage. It’s the community’s unquenchable thirst to use the same language everywhere that brought us here.
replyNodeJS about page makes its case pretty succinctly, JS was a good fit for IO-bound concurrent backends because of the event loop. This was at a time when no other major language/runtime had a good answer for this unless you count Erlang. Plenty of people using it didn't even come from the web frontend side, myself included.
replynpm was also maybe the first default package manager that "just works," unlike Python or browser JS.
A lot of people don't realize NodeJS was made because the creator wanted to make a runtime dedicated to asynchronous IO, didn't want to use a language with a pre-existing standard library and ecosystem built around synchronous IO, and realized that JS almost uniquely fit the bill. It was not built for the purpose of letting people who only knew JS use JS on the server.
replyThis tracks, cause the NodeJS website also doesn't mention anything about people already knowing JS. And imports worked completely differently between browser and Node, so they were pretty separate things at least at the start.
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