You wouldn't conflate Windows development with "C" (and completely discount UNIX along the way) just because of Win32. But that's about how bonkers it is when it comes to JS and people do the same with its relationship to Node—not only was JS not created to serve the Node ecosystem, the prescriptions that NPM and Node programmers insist on often cut against the grain of the language. And that's just when we're focused on convention and haven't even gotten to the outright incompatibilities between Node and the language standard (or Node's proprietary APIs).
node_modules, for example? That has fuck-all to do with ECMA262/JS. Tailwind, Rollup, Prettier, all this other stuff—even the misleadingly named ESLint? Same. You're having a terrible experience because you're interacting with terrible software. It doesn't matter that it's written in JS (or quasi-JS). Rewrite these implementations all in other languages, and the terrible experience will remain.
Besides, anyone who's staking out a position that a language is slow, and that JS is one of them is wrong two ways, and you don't have to listen to or legitimize them.