In my opinion, any advancement is worthwhile, even if current consensus is that it’s over-optimization. And if it starts tying up its loose ends, it’ll no doubt benefit node developers as well. Healthy competition and all that.

I’m with you on that. I’ve built dozens and dozens of node apps both professionally and for personal projects and yeah maybe the package installs could be faster, but the overall performance of the server has also been pretty good. If node is slow for you, maybe there’s some other optimizations to be made rather than switching the next new things as a solution.