I guess I don't see the difference here if your VM startup time is 3 seconds or 15-30 seconds. If that's the difference between the site remaining stable and the whole thing collapsing then it seems like you're setting yourself up for a big outage one day when the nodejs process isn't able to come back in three seconds for whatever reason.
I think it depends a bit on class of errors. Certainly not everything is suitable for this treatment.
Lost connectivity to RabbitMQ or Elasticsearch would mean our site is dead anyhow (you can't do anything). So either of those errors should arguably result in some static 500 pardon-our-appearance page.
But say someone messes up the network connection or we get a brief problem.
