I think JS is fine. The root of the "problem" is that the web is an unusual platform. It actually punishes bloat, in a way other platforms don't. A native app

I think JS is fine. The root of the "problem" is that the web is an unusual platform. It actually punishes bloat, in a way other platforms don't. A native app can use a hundred libraries and a gigabyte of download size to do something trivial, but on the web that won't fly. That means web developers must learn that code reuse is a tradeoff instead of seeing it as a pure positive. That's a good thing in my book. Either take the heat and replace your 10 dependencies with 1000 custom-written lines, which is usually easy in JS, or get out of the kitchen.