The difference is that Rails has DHH as BDFL and he didn't want to make money out of Rails (if you don't count public speaking...) and Node has no BDFL...

Node has had a few BDFLs in its lifetime: Ryan Dahl (2009-2012), Isaac Schlueter (2012-2014) and TJ Fontaine (2014 onwards)

Almost all of Node's problems stem from Joyent. They're just incompetent at stewarding the Node project.