NodeJS is actually considered to be an easier, faster, and generally less complicated way to build a CRUD app... Sans the ridiculous package/dependency management. Also, that's not exclusive to Node, that's just web dev these days... But for example, coming from .NET to Node, you'll feel it's a lot simpler and even .NET isn't that tough.

Overkill how?

Backend is always required for any infrastructure and app to work. What you choose for backend - java, php, nodejs, python, whatever is up to you.

Usually you decide based on:

1. What experience Lead have with each language/environment/tools
2. What experience your team have with each as well
3. Ease of use, learning curve, documentation, community, introduction of breaking changes, stability, how stable product is, is it actively developed, etc.
4. How do you plan to host and maintain your solution, install it and all required packages on the server (In case of typical hosting providers node might not be the option, while on your own servers or VPS you may install whatever you want)

You use what you know the best (c)

Stop thinking about microperfomance and useless benchmarks. If you will be 0.05% lucky enough your CRUD will require thinking about microperformance after many years.

I would say that it's the opposite of overkill; It's the simplest way to get a CRUD app into production from what I've seen.

What makes you think of it as overkill? Perhaps I'm not understanding the angle you're approaching it from and could better address the question given the details of the complexity you're facing?

It might depend on the team of developers developing the app. If they have experience in javascript or know nodejs then using nodejs in the backend makes sense. But if not then using nodejs might not be that useful. It most of the times depends on the type of project that needs to be implemented. Nodejs is useful when we need asynchronous non blocking requests to server like retrieving data from databases and serving them to clients but it might not be useful if we need to do memory intensive operations in the backend like image processing or matrix transformations. Hope that answers you question suitably.

NOT AT ALL, Node.Js is really simple and creating a simple crud app you don't have worry much about.

You might be talking about the initial set-up time, you have deal with creating a server, routings, database connections etc.

But see all these things you must have to handle by their web server f.eg. nginx, Appache, IIS or TomCat.

but with nodeJs you can do all this right from the beginning of your app which is really cool.

Why should it be overkill? Node.js is a " JavaScript run-time environment for executing JavaScript code server-side". Whats your "not overkill" solution? :)