Genuine question: why is everybody acting like the midterms were a huge success when dems lost 5 house seats?

Sure there wasn’t a red wave but like… this is still bad? House and senate seats both look like they’ll be getting gop control. As of this post senate is 46 dem/48 GOP. The GOP has almost 20 seats on dems. That’s really bad. Can someone ELI5 why the news is blowing this up as an utter failure for republicans?