1) Crap standard library and core language, with lots of accidental complexity. These problems are fixed or (more often) swept under the rug many times over by

1) Crap standard library and core language, with lots of accidental complexity. These problems are fixed or (more often) swept under the rug many times over by library authors over the course of years, then eventually the core language/lib provides its own attempt at a fix, but by then there are a ton of implementations out in the wild and it'll takes years for a typical mid-size projects dependency tree to shake out all the "deprecated" libraries of any given feature like this, if it ever does. That so many libraries have to pull in other libs for really basic stuff bloats your node_modules dir in a hurry. 2) Platform incompatibility plus no-one actually writes real Javascript that can run directly on any platform anymore anyway, so there are polyfills for yet-to-be-implemented language features and compatibility overlays galore. 3) And yes a lot of it's just the fault of Javascript "culture".