Respect for embracing existing tech instead of rewriting a worse version of it. Wonder where we would be today if all alternative-building effort went to Node instead (with proper leadership).

You might remember the io.js fork of Node.js back in 2014. Node was stagnating, a bunch of people forked it into io.js, which eventually got merged back into Node and got it back on track. Or, going further back, CoffeeScript, a "fork" of JS that had its best ideas adopted back into ES5.

A small scrappy team can prove out a good idea because failure is not a catastrophic risk to them. In short, forks are part of a healthy ecosystem.

Fundamentally you can't fix a lot of things with this approach.

Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").

When an organization digs into bad decisions, the only way to fix them is to start something new. The entire JS ecosystem will never have documentation on its config as long as everyone keeps building on top of Node.

(And there are many other issues like this in the Node ecosystem; the utter absurdity of not being able to document config is just my personal pet peeve.)