I agree. If you want a statically typed language, then there are plenty of excellent languages that compile to JavaScript. But making JavaScript "more like Java

I agree. If you want a statically typed language, then there are plenty of excellent languages that compile to JavaScript. But making JavaScript "more like Java" has already failed back in the 2000s when ES4 was spec'd. JavaScript isn't the most advanced, beautiful, whatever language. Its point is that it's ubiquitous even beyond browsers. By using language extensions you're tying your code to a particular tool chain such as TS or babel, and are already developing not-quite-JavaScript; you could just as well use a better language in the first place. I think the problem is that people are abusing JavaScript for large projects when JavaScript's purpose is small-scale DOM manipulation in response to UI events.