One chef, one kitchen, a hundred orders — and nobody's food is late. If I told you a restaurant had only one chef handling a hundred orders simultaneously — and every order came out on time — you'd think I was lying. One person can't cook a hundred dishes at once. That's physically impossible. But what if the chef wasn't doing all the cooking? What if the chef's job was to manage the kitchen — start dishes, delegate tasks to ovens and timers, and plate food when it's ready? Suddenly, one chef handling a hundred orders doesn't sound crazy. It sounds efficient . That's exactly how Node.js works. One thread. Thousands of requests. No thread-per-request overhead. And it works because Node.js doesn't try to do everything itself — it delegates and coordinates . This was one of those concepts in the ChaiCode Web Dev Cohort 2026 that seemed counterintuitive at first but made perfect sense once I saw it in action. Let me break it down.…