Slow, brittle backends kill product velocity.
It's easy to ship a Node.js API. It's hard to ship one that stays fast under peak load, degrades gracefully when a third-party API is down, is safe to deploy on a Friday afternoon, and hands off cleanly to the next team.
Most backends are built in the first category and quietly move to the second only after an incident forces the issue. I design for the second from day one.