is there consensus on whether Node did or did not "catch"? like, sure, it was a launch language of AWS Lambda and Netflix uses it heavily. but every backend person I know uses Go or Python or Ruby, anything other than JS. pretty much only fullstack JS people consistently pick nodejs as first choice - but that's just my POV. I'd love some more definitive numbers.
Node as a tool definitely did catch on: automated testing, package management, REPL integration, bundling etc.
Node as a server/backend language: I would say the say the ecosystem and usage are at least as large as Go/Ruby. This is hard to gauge. But I assume/expect a factor of 2 or more. If you look for web specific libraries it is unlikely you'd find something for either Go/Ruby but not for Node. Python is harder to compare because it is used much more broadly.
For me the biggest use-cases for Node are: server-side/static rendering (get all the power/expression of frontend libraries on your http/build server), web-socket ease of use and the fact that there are tons of programmers who are at least familiar with the language.
And even though it is steadily declining, the most popular web-backend language is still PHP by a long shot. And this won't change until the other languages get managed hosting that is as cheap and simple and similarly ubiquitous.
It's absolutely catching on with younger developers who don't want to bother using multiple languages. Anecdotally, like 100% of developers in their 20s at my company push hard for JS.
Its components are part of every developer's toolbox (a lot of really essential command line tools use to be installed with npm). I don't see many backends powered by it, but I'm mostly a Python developer and that certainly biases my samples.
