Very! Re-creating the javascript asset pipeline would be beyond painful and not work with everything very well. Using node is the right way, regardless of how heavy node is. ^.^
EDIT: My main complaint with the node stuff is the 50-thousand asset pipelines that do not interoperate (Brunch, Webpack, Gulp, Grunt, JSPM, Bower, NPM, etc… etc.. etc.) and where certain libraries will only work with certain things (I have 4 of the above things in my big project right now because of javascript ecosystem utter-stupidity). I do not care ‘what’ is chosen, but there needs to be only one thing chosen…