This is true, I don't like the fact that JS is needed either, but as someone who has used Unity as well, the current state of GNOME is much better in other aspe

This is true, I don't like the fact that JS is needed either, but as someone who has used Unity as well, the current state of GNOME is much better in other aspects. As far as I can tell, JS was chosen to make it easier to extend, without requiring knowledge of systems programming languages like C, while also preventing all sorts of memory bugs which could crash the whole desktop (technically still possible, but harder to accidentally do).