[jorisd]

The NodeJS community isn't averse to shell commands as you described; far from it I'd say. But a main differentiating factor between the Node and Python community is that Node folks like to compose things from lower level functionality a bit more, and are much more into functional paradigms and patterns. It helps that in Node, everything has essentially consolidated to using Express and Connect-style middleware, so interop between frameworks and libraries is high, and it's easy to go from a lower level basic framework to one that has batteries included (to put it in Python analogies: going from NodeJS "Flask" to NodeJS "Django" is easy because in Node "Django" runs on top of "Flask" and has support for the same middleware pattern, so all "Flask" middleware works fine if you switch to "Django"). The higher level batteries included frameworks almost always ship with their own CLI and tooling that closely matches what you'd find in something like Django; take a look at Nest.js for an example of such a framework.