Whether or not running it as root is a problem is really up to you. If you think it’s too risky with what your app is doing you can use a proxy or a port redirect with iptables, or even use your internet router to do that and just run the app on 8080 or some other high numbered port.
It just depends on what your specific needs are. I usually run my apps behind haproxy or another webserver so I can have multiple instances running for redundancy and load balancing. If it’s something that doesn’t see a lot of traffic I usually run just two instances.