I find that a specious argument. The same could be said of anything from programming languages to pizza toppings. "Thing X is bad because it discourages people

I find that a specious argument. The same could be said of anything from programming languages to pizza toppings. "Thing X is bad because it discourages people from learning about things which are not X." I would argue that JS platforms actually make it much easier to try out other languages because change languages while keeping the rest the same. Tons of languages compile to and/or run on top of JS.