It was born as a 'just good enough' hack, jammed into a static document presentation system into which interactive application functionality was shoehorned with

It was born as a 'just good enough' hack, jammed into a static document presentation system into which interactive application functionality was shoehorned with pain points at every turn. It currently writhes in a morass of dependency hell, sprouting a hundred duplicate efforts of trying to soften those pain points every day. And it managed to get so big because the W3C continued, year after year, to obstinately refuse to acknowledge the web as an application platform until very recently. But, they did acknowledge it. And they're now making design decisions to facilitate the web as an application platform, rather than intentionally trying to make application development as difficult as possible to dissuade it. So now we've got WebAssembly and tomorrow or the day after we will have any language anyone wants to use being used. In that arena, Javascript will get pantsed and laughed out of the room. It will probably happen with pretty amazing speed, as there are legions of developers who have been holding their breath for this for 20 years.