This is fundamentally because every Javascript tool is an incredibly leaky abstraction. The problem isn't so much that "raw" Javascript has a lot of problems;

This is fundamentally because every Javascript tool is an incredibly leaky abstraction. The problem isn't so much that "raw" Javascript has a lot of problems; it's that every solution requires you to fully understand the problem and the architecture of the solution. Promises ease the pain of async in JS, but you've got to understand async well enough to implement Promises yourself in order to accurately predict their behaviour. JQuery eases the pain of the DOM, but you've got to understand how the DOM (and events) work to use it properly. Angular eases the pain of structuring large applications, but you've got to understand...everything...before you can use it properly. And also jQuery. And also the DOM. And also a build tool to manage the heap of complexity you've just bought. This sort of thing does occurs in other ecosystems: for example, I love Clojure, but you're going to have a bad time with it if you don't grok how Java works. But the JS ecosystem is absolutely teeming with it - often nested several layers deep! The JS community seem to have Stockholm syndrome about this. In other contexts it is just not normal to have to operate simultaneously at all levels of the abstraction hierarchy, at all times. Joel Spolsky wrote his famous "leaky abstractions" essay because it was not immediately obvious that when (eg) using a TCP connection, you'll eventually want to know about how IP works. If TCP/IP had been written in the modern JS ecosystem, you'd need to have a working knowledge of ICMP packet types before you finished debugging "Hello, World" in TCP v2.0.1-rc4(deprecated).