I think it also has influences on my mind being a JavaScript developers for years. Even with help of TypeScript, programming UI with virtual DOM is still a lot like “scripting”(besides templating and styling). I say “scripting” since it can be quite different from “programming”. I see my friend post their code in Rust, TypeScript, Haskell and some of the code are like controlling all the details before code is executed. While doing “scripting”, I don’t have every detail in control, I do trying and fast iterating again and again.
With this in mind, Node.js turned out to be quite a nice tool for scripting. And with help of ClojureScript, It hot replaces running code as I save file, functions got updated without breaking any connections(like WebSockets). That’s quite handy. I don’t do much server-side programming so I’m not sure how backend people really think about this. But probably there are a lots of reason choosing JVM for the purpose of “programming”.