Well, they weren't professional programmers (not their main job, done out of necessity) and they weren't trained. As I understand it they were actually learning it all on the go (like a lot of new programmers). It wouldn't be shocking if a lot of JS devs were in a similar boat, which explains the community a little bit.
So yeah, they're programmers now, but they didn't start out that way and the app showed it. That's what JS and the browser allowed them to do.
So experienced devs are afraid of learning something that took non-programmers a week to get up to speed and develop a well-architechted app with reusable components etc?
We had a set of non-programmers who built a complex jQuery app over a year, which was then translated into a Mithril app over a summer.
What I said was you can be building complex applications in one of these frontend frameworks in a week. Judging from a few responses in this thread, there are a lot of people who don't want to do that for whatever reason.
So yeah, they're programmers now, but they didn't start out that way and the app showed it. That's what JS and the browser allowed them to do.