Overview of the talk from a comment[0] of that video:

> The goal of Node was event driven HTTP servers.

>

> 5:04

> 1 Regret: Not sticking with Promises.

> * I added promises to Node in June 2009 but foolishly removed them in February 2010.

> * Promises are the necessary abstraction for async/await.

> * It's possible unified usage of promises in Node would have sped the delivery of the eventual standartization and async/await.

> * Today Node's many async APIs are aging baldly due to this.

>

> 6:02

> 2 Regret: Security

> * V8 by itself is a very good security sandbox

> * Had I put more thought into how that could be maintained for certain applications, Node colud have had some nice security guarantees not available in any other language.

> * Example: Your linter shouldn't get complete access to your computer and network.

>

> 7:01

> 3 Regret: The Build System (GYP)

> * Build systems are very difficult and very important.

> * V8 (via Chrome) started using GYP and I switched Node over in tow.

> * Later Chrome dropped GYP for GN. Leaving Node the sole GYP user.

> * GYP is not an ugly internal interface either - it is exposed to anyone who's trying to bind to V8.

> * It's an awful experience for users. It's this non-JSON, Python adaptation of JSON.

> * The continued usage of GYP is the probably largest failure of Node core.

> * Instead of guiding users to write C++ bindings to V8, I should have provided a core foreign function interface (FFI)

> * Many people, early on, suggested moving to an FFI (namely Cantrill) and regrettably I ignored them.

> * (And I am extremely displeased that libuv adopted autotools.)

>

> 9:52

> 4 Regret: package.json

> * Isaac, in NPM, invented package.json (for the most part)

> * But I sanctioned it by allowing Nod's require() to inspect package.json files for "main"

> * Ultimately I included NPM in the Node distribution, which much made it the defacto standard.

> * It's unfortunate that there is centralized (privately controlled even) repository for modules.

> * Allowing package.json gave rise to the concept of a "module" as a directory of files.

> * This is no a strictly necessary abstraction - and one that doesn't exist on the web.

> * package.json now includes all sorts of unnecessary information. License? Repository? Description? It's boilerplate noise.

> * If only relative files and URLs were used when importing, the path defines the version. There is no need to list dependencies.

>

> 12:35

> 5 Regret: node_modules

> * It massively complicates the module resolution algorithm.

> * vendored-by-default has good intentions, but in practice just using $NODE_PATH wouldn't have precluded that.

> * Deviates greatly from browser semantics

> * It's my fault and I'm very sorry.

> * Unfortunately it's impossible to undo now.

>

> 14:00

> 6 Regret: require("module") without the extension ".js"

> * Needlessly less explicit.

> * Not how browser javascript works. You cannot omit the ".js" in a script tag src attribute.

> * The module loader has to query the file system at multiple locations trying to guess what the user intended.

>

> 14:40

> 7 Regret: index.js

> * I thought it was cute, because there was index.html

> * It needlessly complicated the module loading system.

> * It became especially unnecessary after require supported package.json

>

> 15:28 Talks about Deno.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&lc=UgwteTb0N1PFq...