I had a conversation with a frontend developer on my team last week that I think perfectly sums up where we are right now. He was pushing—hard—for us to rewrite our authentication microservice in Deno. His arguments were solid: native TypeScript, better security defaults, no node_modules abyss. On paper, he was right. Deno is objectively “better” designed in a lot of ways.
I told him no.
Not because I hate progress. I actually love what Deno and Bun have done for the ecosystem. They lit a fire under the Node.js project that was desperately needed. But here we are in January 2026, and Node isn’t the sluggish, config-heavy beast it was three years ago. It adapted. It stole the best features from its competitors. And most importantly, it’s still the boring, predictable choice that lets me sleep at night.
The TypeScript Headache is Finally (Mostly) Gone
Remember 2023? Setting up a Node project with TypeScript was a ritualistic punishment. You needed ts-node, nodemon, a complex tsconfig.json, and maybe rimraf just to clean the build folder. You spent half a day configuring tooling before writing a single line of logic.
That’s dead. Thank god.
Since Node started getting serious about type stripping, I haven’t touched a complex build pipeline for backend services in months. The ability to just run node server.ts and have it work—ignoring the types but executing the code—was the feature that stopped me from jumping ship to Bun.
Here is what my “setup” looks like these days. No build step. No transpiler drama. Just Node doing its job.
// server.ts
import { createServer } from 'node:http';
interface UserRequest {
id: number;
name: string;
}
const server = createServer((req, res) => {
// The types are stripped at runtime, but my IDE is happy
const user: UserRequest = {
id: 1,
name: "Dev2026"
};
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
res.end(JSON.stringify(user));
});
server.listen(3000, () => {
console.log('Server running on http://localhost:3000');
});Is it as theoretically pure as Deno’s runtime type checking? No. Do I care? Also no. I just want to write type-safe code and run it without configuring Webpack or Rollup for a backend service.
Node Copied Deno’s Homework (And I’m Glad)
Competition is amazing. If Ryan Dahl hadn’t released Deno, I am convinced Node would still be debating whether to add a native test runner. Instead, the Node TSC (Technical Steering Committee) looked at the features people loved in other runtimes and just… added them.
I used to pull in dotenv, jest, and nodemon for every single project. That was the “MERN stack starter pack.” Now? It’s all built-in.
- Native .env support:
node --env-file=.env index.js. Done. No dependency needed. - Test Runner:
node --test. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it doesn’t require a 50MB dependency tree. - Watch Mode:
node --watch. Goodbye, nodemon. You served us well, but I don’t miss you.
It feels like Node finally realized that “minimal core” doesn’t have to mean “painful developer experience.” They bridged the gap. Sure, Deno still has the permission system which is neat (though honestly, I usually just run with --allow-all in containers anyway, don’t judge me), but the gap in DX (Developer Experience) has narrowed significantly.
The “Good Enough” Performance Reality
Let’s talk about speed. Every benchmark I see on Twitter shows Bun running circles around Node. 3x faster startup! 5x faster HTTP requests! It’s impressive engineering.
But in my actual day job? The bottleneck is never the runtime. It’s the database queries. It’s the external API that takes 400ms to respond. It’s the network latency between AWS regions.
I migrated a small service to Bun last year just to test the waters. It was fast, sure. But then I hit a weird edge case with a specific gRPC library that relied on some obscure Node internal API that Bun hadn’t fully polyfilled yet. I spent three days debugging it. I switched back to Node, and it worked instantly.
That three days of debugging cost more than any millisecond performance gain I would have gotten over the next year. In 2026, V8 is fast enough. Node is fast enough. Unless you are building high-frequency trading platforms in JavaScript (why?), the performance difference is academic.
The npm Gravity Well
This is the elephant in the room that never leaves. The npm ecosystem is a mess, a chaotic sprawl of abandoned packages and security risks. We all know this. But it’s our mess.
Every time I look at a competitor, I check my critical dependencies. Deno has done a great job with npm compatibility—it’s surprisingly good now. But “compatibility” layers always make me nervous. I’ve been burned too many times by “it works 99% of the time.” That 1% is where you lose your weekend.
With Node, if a package exists, it works. If there’s a security vulnerability, GitHub Dependabot screams at me, and I patch it. It’s a workflow that is deeply integrated into every CI/CD pipeline, every enterprise security scanner, and every developer’s muscle memory.
When I Actually Recommend Alternatives
I don’t want to sound like a Node maximalist. There are times I cheat on Node.
If I’m writing a CLI tool? I use Deno. Compiling to a single binary is just too good to pass up, and the permission system makes sense for local scripts. If I’m spinning up a temporary edge function? Cloudflare Workers (which is closer to the web standard approach Deno uses) is my go-to.
But for the core application—the API that handles payments, manages user data, and needs to be up 24/7—I stick with Node.
Stability is a Feature
Here is the reality of backend development in 2026: I want my tools to be invisible. I don’t want to “experience” my runtime. I want to write business logic.
Node.js has reached that stage of maturity where it’s boring. The release notes are mostly incremental performance bumps, security patches, and slow adoption of web standards. And that is exactly what I want.
So, to the junior dev who wanted to rewrite our auth service: I get it. New tech is shiny. But Node isn’t going anywhere. It absorbed the best ideas from the new kids on the block and kept the one thing they can’t replicate yet: fifteen years of battle-testing.
I’ll take “boring and working” over “exciting and broken” any day of the week.
