> I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.
To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology.
I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well. Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some things, but definitely not for everything. If that were the case, Twistd and Tornado would have been much more popular before Node.js even existed. My perception is that Node.js is primarily popular because it attracted hordes of client-side developers to server programming, something that used to be too inaccessible before. Hard to dislike something that instantly gives you the impression you can write your own servers.
I would say Python frameworks like Flask or Pyramid offer the first 2 benefits as well, and when used properly in combination with a caching proxy and container server that allows asynchronous processing the 3rd benefit too. So they are not unique to Node.js although out-of-the-box, as a standalone application server, Node will be faster.
Which leaves the 'JavaScript comfort zone' as the main driver of Node popularity, which while understandable, IMO isn't exactly a technological benefit, rather a downside (I don't like JavaScript, at all).
