Ye, 100% true. I've spent many man-years writing entire systems like this in C and Java.
It's just in node, doing it in the evented way was actually simpler and quicker to implement, than the 'ghetto' way. This isn't usually the case, and I always recommend doing the simplest thing that works first. It's just nice here that the simplest thing is also a tight solution.
We use it to mean, the quick and dirty simple solution that we write first, and that is usually good enough but your a little embarrassed to admit. It's not the elegant or crafted, but works.
Our original solution was literally a shell exec, and it was perfectly fine (..for a while)
It's just in node, doing it in the evented way was actually simpler and quicker to implement, than the 'ghetto' way. This isn't usually the case, and I always recommend doing the simplest thing that works first. It's just nice here that the simplest thing is also a tight solution.