The root of the problem is the original intent of Javascript. Javascript was intended to be a small layer of dynamism added to web pages that were mostly define

The root of the problem is the original intent of Javascript. Javascript was intended to be a small layer of dynamism added to web pages that were mostly defined via HTML which were presented to a human for interpretation. When your user agent is a human trying to look up an address for a restaurant, they can look at a garbled piece of crap where the JS crashed and still maybe find what they were looking for in the rendered text. Limp along the best you can is a great failure strategy for Javascript's original use-case. Only now that we've turned Javascript into a general purpose programming language is this a failure. Even Javascript's weak typing makes sense in this case. Why automatically convert everything? Becausethe expectation was that inputs to your Javascript would be HTML attributes which are all strings. Automating type conversions from strings made sense. But once you move to larger scale programing, Javascript's weak typing is awful