Right, you need some historical context to understand the situation. 10 years ago JS was a shitty language with a far worse ecosystem. It deserved the hate it g

Right, you need some historical context to understand the situation. 10 years ago JS was a shitty language with a far worse ecosystem. It deserved the hate it got. Then ES6 came along 6 years ago or so and added tons of super valuable language features. Suddenly you don't have to deal with the hoisting semantics of var or worrying about what 'this' is all the time. It was so nice that people started using Babel to use the new features ASAP. Then a couple years later, once everyone has a transpiler in their build process without a second thought (this used to be controversial!), TypeScript comes along and provides another huge leap in how pleasant the language is to use. Now it's a pretty nice ecosystem, but it used to be pretty bad. Not everyone's biases have caught up yet.