I didn't feel like I valued Javascript for years until JQuery came around. Even with JQuery, it still felt like a second class citizen simply enabling rich UI interaction on top of server generated markup. There were a few years of darkness during what I call the "early transpiler wars" when co-workers fought to adopt CoffeeScript or Dart or whatever else was the flavor was at the time.
Then Node came along. Personally, it took me a while to come around to Node for backend. Until that point, I was using Node mostly for server side rendering of react. I wrote my first node backend over the past 14 months on Google Cloud and it was generally a great experience. Admittedly, spending years in PHP, Python and Java, the biggest learning curve was to properly account for Promises and not doing non-performant things like array.forEach (vs. traditional for loops) with big datasets. I was skeptical at first of Node's single threaded nature, but I believe most concerns around that are simply misunderstandings of how it works.
I will say that part of my decision to adopt Node was ease of hiring circa Nov 2018. Initially, I planned the architecture to be a React front end supported by Python APIs. We were getting a lot more applicants for the React positions than the Python ones. Cross training was thus a lot easier and I think really helped the team as a whole on a variety of fronts.
To that point, I would disagree that Javascript is unpopular.