Why is python used for API calls?

Getting meta data of a file (or any other filesystem-entry)

The meta data (modification date, size and id) of a file (or any other filesystem-entry) is stored in the parent folder, (at least in the filesystems I've tested (ext4, ntfs)). This means that a programming language (or API) that can exploit this, can acquire the necessary meta data much faster (like 10 times faster) than an API that must make a OS-request for each file.

Particularly python and C++ can do this (while node.js can't)

The file timestamp resolution also differs between different APIs

node.js "fs"-library: 3 decimals

python: 9 decimals

As for using other "APIs" one can note that when using:

scp: 0 decimals are kept on the copy.

Summary

Using python instead of node.js to parse the filesystem-trees makes it much faster, and gives you much better timestamp resolution.