It consolidates a lot of really annoying nits and quality of life aspects like bundling, module resolution, testing, env handling, etc. Node is just the runtime and still would require libs like esbuild, jest/vitest, dotenv, and so on. It's genuinely nice to have those out of the box, and generally in Bun the performance is quite significantly better in places that matter.

Let me address each one in turn:

- esbuild - this is normally for TS compilation, which Node can run natively now by stripping types: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/typescript.html#type-stri...

- jest/vitest: Node has a test runner: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/test.html

- dotenv: Node can read .env files: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cli.html#--env-filefile

Performance, maybe you're right - but if you're doing any IO, I doubt the runtime is really the bottleneck.