Aside from the callback chains and API shit, my issues with Node rest almost entirely on the lack of a standard library, because that led to the state of NPM today, which is just an absolute garbage-fire shitshow as far as I'm concerned.

I have my own separate issues with NPM, namely its dependency resolution (my God, just take dnf's dependency resolution algorithm and use it), trivial packages that other packages list as a dependency (is this an int? Is this running on Windows? Better take this one line and make it a package!), and the relative inability to remove a package from a registry (did a secret slip in there while testing? Tough shit!). The worst of that being the trivial packages, I think, because then you can end up with projects that can have a dependency tree 10s of thousands packages long.

And all that bullshit wouldn't be even 1/16th of the problem it is today if there were a standard library.

You should take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, though, I'm just a DevOps Sysadmin, and aside from running some software that uses Node, most of my experience with it is unfucking it when our devs come to me to fix the tangled monster they've created.