I fully agree. Performance is not even that important, but for much of the Node.js/MongoDB hype cycle, thats what people often claimed was its biggest advantage; that "average" developers could now write servers that scale beyond what was thought to be practical.
But if that isn't true, then JS has to be measured against other languages on different merits, and e.g. Ruby and Lua are just as suitable for quick prototyping.
Anyway, these discussions usually end in language zealots downvoting each other and not much else, even on HN. Facebook still runs on PHP, so theres that.
If you compare apples to apples I think the hype for NodeJS for most development is well deserved.
The fact that we are comparing static typed compiled languages like C and Java to NodeJS in order to find higher performance alternatives says a lot about it.
NodeJS isn't a replacement for those lower level languages, however when compared to other dynamic languages like PHP, Ruby, or Python it's suddenly far more competitive.
PHP is probably the main target in my opinion for Node. It's an incredibly popular language for nearly any web application use case.
These benchmarks really only place Java, Go and Lua above NodeJS in terms of performance.
Bundle in the ecosystem and developer productivity and it does earn the praise it received.
At the end of the day, the vast majority of developers will never need to optimize their applications past what NodeJS offers. Few of us will really deal with massive scaling issues on a day to day basis, nearly any modern language will handle the majority of applications. By the time performance is an issue it's probably time for a major refactor or rewrite building on the knowledge gained in the original version.
But if that isn't true, then JS has to be measured against other languages on different merits, and e.g. Ruby and Lua are just as suitable for quick prototyping.
Anyway, these discussions usually end in language zealots downvoting each other and not much else, even on HN. Facebook still runs on PHP, so theres that.