Why hasn't anyone abstracted the event loop model to scale across multiple machines or utilize modern processors? Perhaps with something more like an Actor model or Erlang's BEAM?
It seems like just getting the JavaScript concurrency model as an abstraction over multicore or multi-machine concurrency would be one of the easiest ways to achieve this. I realize that this is still technically difficult, but programming tends towards "just porting things to JavaScript." I would love to have something like Phoenix framework, just built with JavaScript/TypeScript, and I can scale a back end by bumping size of a machine or scaling horizontally.
If you want the features of BEAM/dist plus running some javascript, I'd suggest you build your coordination layer in a BEAM language and have some glue to run javascript as a spawned port, or possibly connect node as a c_node to dist.
Node is multithreaded by default. I believe the default setting is using 4 threads. Most of Node is written in C++.
The JS code written by end users is single threaded (most of it at least) but IO etc is all executed with libuv.