Much of this is valid in spirit. But to me, is irrelevant with the advent of Node. Node does all the good things the author describes. It does some terrible things too, but generally does them much less terribly than PHP.
I think one of the things that made node great, is standardizing on CommonJS modules, and error-first callbacks... That alone makes it much easier to build everything else on top of. JS does have some "bad parts" but they're easy enough to avoid via linting/testing.
NPM is another great/horrible thing in JS... people get hung up on the size of some packages, it's worth noting that a lot of that size doesn't go into your application, mainly because those packaging don't always know enough to exclude their samples, tests and documentation from the module as packaged in npm. Which is a mixed blessing.
You do get a lot of file bloat as it's not pre-build/bundled in npm (usually), and as such there is a lot of file-system access at startup (SSD strongly encouraged).
Through all its' warts, I'd still take it over almost everything else I've ever worked with.