I think developer experience was bad all round "back in the day". Eg PHP didn't have stack traces, query parameters were automatically set as variables (and quo

I think developer experience was bad all round "back in the day". Eg PHP didn't have stack traces, query parameters were automatically set as variables (and quotes escaped with backslashes... Depending on your sysadmin's config...) Compilers would produce broken binaries instead of erroring. By comparison, most people learning JS since Web 2.0 have experience with friendlier languages.