do people make bloated garbage with it? absolutely
does it have weird type coercion quirks? yep

but it's still very good to use. for websites, 'progressive enhancement' is key. Use js where it makes sense, fallback when not available.

nodejs is actually very nice for a lot of things, and can be really performant too.

npm as a company sucks, but the dependency model is actually quite good; sticking to modular dependencies as opposed to bad big frameworks like angular and lodash

want to know more on getting started properly?
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/95ed77b71790442b7e61