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It really depends. The stuff I'm doing in this video for example is writing a driver stack for a device called the Bus Pirate. Communication is done over serial (which is easy in node with the serialport library). The bus pirate is a device that allows you to talk to other devices over different protocols, including SPI, I2C, and OneWire (as well as bit banging, where you control some electrical signals directly any way you want using software). So while it's not something you'd do directly in production, you can actually test communication with devices in JS in a fast, iterative, interactive way without having to use a microcontroller. You can actually figure out all of your design decisions there and port your code to the microcontroller later if you're building some kind of embedded system device, potentially saving a lot of time and debugging.
I second this - I've been doing it for the last 4 years in a library with over 10k active users. Node.js might not be as fast as C for some tasks, but when the hardware you're talking to is the limiting factor, it just doesn't matter that the driver could be 4x as fast.