JS's popularity is the canonical example of "a quirk of history". It is popular solely because until roughly now, it has always been the _sole_ language for the

JS's popularity is the canonical example of "a quirk of history". It is popular solely because until roughly now, it has always been the _sole_ language for the enormously popular web platform. Better proxies would be Go and Ruby since both occupy the same niches; however, this doesn't support your point as Go has grown much, much faster than Ruby.