I was learning babel and webpack and then it turns out I need to install node.js to run them both and I asked myself WHY? Then according to my research, we need node.js for webpack and babel since both of them were written in JS and to run that JS code which transpiles( for babel) and bundles up the code(for webpack). Also, another reason is that since both babel and webpack handles our JS code outside of the browser, this is the reason to use Node.js. Are these reasons true?
According to the Node.js website -
Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
Webpack and babel (along with many other tools you might use for frontend development) are written in javascript and since they are command line tools, they need a way to run outside of the browser (directly on your machine).
They could have used some other language to write the tools but since they chose to write them in javascript, Node.js is the only feasible options right now.
In case you are interested, the original creator of nodejs Ryan Dahl has built another secure runtime environment for Javascript/Typescript called Deno