Currently, the Node.js distroless container runs the Node.js process as PID 1:

# ps
PID   USER     TIME  COMMAND
    1 root      0:00 /nodejs/bin/node
   27 root      0:00 sh
   33 root      0:00 ps

According to Node.js's best practices:

Node.js was not designed to run as PID 1 which leads to unexpected behaviour when running inside of Docker. For example, a Node.js process running as PID 1 will not respond to SIGINT (CTRL-C) and similar signals.

So basically, Node.js apps won't receive SIGTERM, SIGINT, etc. when running inside gcr.io/distroless/nodejs.