I think most people (including me) would agree that type coercion makes JavaScript a worse language, and that boxed types are one of the ugliest things in Java.

I think most people (including me) would agree that type coercion makes JavaScript a worse language, and that boxed types are one of the ugliest things in Java. By "the three examples seem reasonable when viewed in the right way", I mean that it's possible to build an intuition about how JavaScript behaves in these situations, and it doesn't require memorizing a giant spec. The behavior isn't random, it's the consequence of some early design decisions that likely should have been made differently, and understanding those design decisions will make you a better JavaScript programmer. Many smart people have been working on improving JavaScript for a while now, and many of the problems have been fixed either by language improvements or widely-available tools. The runtime behavior of basic operators can't be changed, though, so we'll likely be stuck with the type coercion rules for a long time, although it's worth noting that both TypeScript and Flow disallow `null >= 0`.