You're right that this is trade-off is somewhat inevitable, but I feel like Seattle's traffic is disproportionately bad for a city of its size. Seattle is consistently listed as one of the top 10 worst traffic cities in America and is not even in the top 20 in terms of population.
Have a look at the article. Portland is consistently rated above Seattle according to all kinds of livability metrics. The public transportation is far better, it's more bike-accessible, there are more breweries and coffeeshops per capita, etc. Now, this is not to bash Seattle, which is unquestionably one of the best cities in America. But Portland's strengths outweigh Seattle's for broad swathes of people.
In response to question 1: yes, it often very much is, as the examples that I raise in the article show. It could well be the case that there are better technologies for this kind of thing according to certain metrics, but those technologies don't have anything even remotely approaching the Node community driving them. In open source anything, that is decisive. Erlang is more mature, yes, but the community is small and highly insular. Tornado, Netty, etc. also do non-blocking I/O and the like, but they simply don't have the same inertia behind them. That inertia could be precisely what makes Node stable and acceptable for ever-broader enterprise usage. But overall, my claim is more sociological than technological.
