The reality of the situation is that JavaScript was designed at a time when there was NO CLUE that it would become the de-facto client-side language for decades

The reality of the situation is that JavaScript was designed at a time when there was NO CLUE that it would become the de-facto client-side language for decades. So now the ECMAScript standard is pushing JavaScript towards a "proper" language, but we need additional tools (TS, Babel, etc) to write in an even more "proper" language/syntax that will give us something that the browser still needs to understand (JavaScript). This isn't a fun process for those of us who have been developing a long time. Look, JavaScript has classes! And modules! Ok, that's good I guess, we're getting there. But that's not learning, that's just getting closer to something we are already familiar with as software engineers.