There are a lot of things to hate about JS: its questionable choices around type coercion, its Date object, for..in on arrays (indices are string) (a consequenc

There are a lot of things to hate about JS: its questionable choices around type coercion, its Date object, for..in on arrays (indices are string) (a consequence of every object key is a string), for..in on objects which also iterate on inherited properties, the fact everything is dynamic, its weak standard library, null vs undefined, many original things…. There are also great things about it: the ease at which one can write in a functional style code, anonymous functions (vs Python), closures (vs Java), immutable strings, the fact that there is not a shitload of classes to instantiate to achieve anything (vs Java), block-scoped variable definitions, sane default function parameter handling (vs Python). Javascript engines are also very fast nowadays because of the ton of engineering going into them. I'd say, above all arguments, you can rapidly build very fast, lightweight and program programs with it. Sure, you can pull a shitload of pointless dependencies and write bloatware that re-render the world on each keypress, and that's what many people do. And to make things worse, they wrap their shit with an entire browser that uses a lot of ram and processing power. But you are not forced to do that. You can also write efficient server code that does not show up in top, has few dependencies if at all, consume a negligible amount of memory and run without failure for months. That's possible too. Frontend-wise, you have amazing frameworks like Svelte that do wonders and would allow you to build very lightweight apps rapidly. That said I would often pick TypeScript so your program is statically type-checked and your code is documented through types, especially for more-than-one-person / non-trivial projects. I also use and like other languages like Python and D (and a bit of Rust) that have good stuff which JS doesn't have (list comprehension, borrowing, traits, named parameter, sane coercion to False…), or bad stuff which JS has. Javascript is not always the best answer, or even a good answers, but it can be one.