My biggest critique is the min version (not gzipped) is pretty heafty at 83kb. Might be worth running through closure compiler to see if it can be brought down further. Using rollup over webpack may also help a bit. the @babel/preset-env should also specify a minimum browser version... IE11 would probably be the most appropriate baseline. though, as mentioned rollup may be better than webpack+babel for a library like this.
TFA seems to be a fairly shallow comparison of React and Angular... nothing really new and while I also prefer React and really don't care for Angular, the comparison is so shallow that it doesn't really give enough "why" to be compelling in either case.
Kind of a meh article. There's very little point to the Angular example, and the rest doesn't provide much.
IMHO, for the most part, just use fetch, and write your own abstraction for your API access over that.
I love JS, love node... but "fast" is relative. There is also scale, and environment cost to consider. You need a runtime, you may need a convoluted build environment. It varies.
For me, it's a language that almost everyone has to know/use as so many applications have a web front end. It's a scripted language that runs almost everywhere you'd want it (Linux, Windows, Mac). You don't generally need a build step for orchestration scripts. package.json tasks with npm make it easy to have your dependencies and the task definitions in one convenient spot.