JavaScript is a programming language. NodeJS is not. It's the substrate that the NPM ecosystem runs on.
The kneejerk comment from the JS hater you're responding to may not have been made with that distinction in mind, but a distinction exists.
It's very much a possibility that the JS hater uses Firefox. Firefox is implemented using an Emacs-like architecture. The Firefox codebase includes millions of lines of JS, and that's been the case since before the language was JITted. For Firefox 1.0, 2.5, and 2.0, I used to run it every day on an 800MHz PIII with 128 MB (later 192 MB, wow-wee!) of RAM. The JS in the Firefox codebase wasn't written in the NodeJS style, and if it had been, that would have made it a non-starter.
Kneejerk JS haters are tiring, but so is the complicitness of NodeJS advocates in conflating JS with the NodeJS ecosystem.