I don't know any polyglot programmers who would consider javascript better than at least one of the other languages they use, and would ditch js for those if they had the option.
Note how I didn't say that many polyglots may think it's the best language, just that it's great as opposed to awful.
I know as a fact from watching tech conferences and talking to people that some elite-level polyglot programmers make it their main working language out of pure choice. Surely one can't assume that everyone doing bleeding-edge Javascript at places like Google is programming every day in absolute misery, or that it's the only thing that they know.
Me personally, I've possibly enjoyed programming in C, OCaml, Swift or Python more at times, but I think ES6+ Javascript is great and I'm happy to use it.
Javascript appears as the 11th most loved language in the SO dev surveys, with 66% of devs working with it reporting to love it, while it appears quite far down in the dreaded list. Typescript indeed fares much better. [1]
Of course, there is the question of whether respondents are True Programmers™ or posers, but I think that's another debate.
> Note how I didn't say that many polyglots may think it's the best language, just that it's great as opposed to awful.
Fair enough :). I think 'great' is a bit of a vague concept, but I definitely would agree that it's far from awful.
I remember when I wrote a lot of JS back in the day ("Javascript: The Good Parts"), I did feel that stripped from the bad parts, I often preferred the elegance of the basic good parts over, say, Ruby and its "blocks, procs and lambda's" (for example).
You said, "I don't know any polyglot programmers who would consider javascript better than at least one of the other languages they use, and would [not] ditch js for those if they had the option."
BS blanket statement.
Some - many, maybe - programmers that in all likelihood multiply your experience and talent by orders of magnitude believe it's a great language.
Not everyone working with JS is doing so with a gun to their heads.