It's not just limited to JavaScript. The tech industry has (had?) too much money and not enough real problems to solve, so it expanded to take advantage of the

It's not just limited to JavaScript. The tech industry has (had?) too much money and not enough real problems to solve, so it expanded to take advantage of the free money by making up complexity just for the sake of it, and somehow the market actually bought into and embraced the BS. You can see it in DevOps (we apparently accepted paying a ~100x markups on servers, so now we have to add complexity such as autoscaling to try and pay less), microservices (why use a simple local function call when you can have network/serialization overhead and unreliability instead?), etc.