During 2014 and 2015, the Node.js community faced a major split over policy, direction, and control. The io.js project was a hostile fork driven by a group who wanted to incorporate several features and change who's in the decision-making process. The end result was a merge of the Node.js and io.js repositories, an independent Node.js foundation to run the show, and the community is working together to move forward in a common direction.

A concrete result of healing that rift is the rapid adoption of new ECMAScript language features. The V8 engine is adopting those new features quickly to advance the state of web development. The Node.js team, in turn, is adopting those features as quickly as they show up in V8, meaning that Promises and async functions are quickly becoming a reality for Node.js programmers.

The bottom line is that the Node.js community not only survived the io.js fork, but the community and the platform it nurtures grew stronger as a result.