When the bar are languages like F#, Haskell, Elm, Reason... How can JS be considered good? All languages have warts, but JS is a language full of them, ambiguity is the name of the game, mutating everything is encouraged and global mutable state is everywhere.
Very little has changed for JS outside of syntax, the core is still rotten.
> Modern JavaScript is pretty sweet to write compared to pre 2015.
That's damning with faint praise if I ever heard it. JavaScript has more or less caught up with the lowest common denominator of other languages. But I've yet to hear anyone make a good case for actively choosing to use it.
I'm a long-time Javascript hater. I recently did some vanilla ES6, now that browser support is finally at a point where you don't need to transpire to ES5 - I admit, ES6 is much nicer than things used to be, and not having to transpile is wonderful.
But realistically you still want a JS build pipeline of some kind, for minification, compiling SASS to CSS, and other things. And of course if you're doing "modern" frontend work, you're not using vanilla JS like I was - you're using a complicated framework like Angular, React etc, and having to deal with the likes of webpack.
And then there's the anaemic standard library - honestly, barely any better than it was 10 years ago. And then, largely as a result, you've got NPM-dependency hell, with hundreds or thousands of deps for just about anything. Want to trim a string - there's a package for that.
And then there are other languages and ecosystems - when you compare JavaScript to those... well, then you really have to admit it's a turd.
Hating on JavaScript isn't a bandwagon - there are many genuine reasons why people dislike it and the ecosystem. IMO, comparing it to a "circle jerk" is like that meme where some character is surrounded by fire saying "this is fine".
Modern JavaScript is pretty sweet to write compared to pre 2015. It sure is fun to join in on the "JavaScript bad" circle jerk though.