I found it hit a strange position between trying to be friendly and trying to be powerful. Things felt very inconsistent. After learning a few patterns in the language, other things I would expect to follow the same patterns went off in their own direction. I wish I could conjure up more specific examples but that's about all I remember from it.
It felt like a language that was built for the singular purpose of supporting Flutter (which I actually did enjoy learning) instead of something that needed to exist in its own right. I wish they'd just picked something already baked.
Well, it was created before Flutter, so it wasn't built for that purpose. They did however steer Dart's direction in a way that would be more suitable for Flutter than as a JS replacement which is what it was created for. I don't think it's fair to criticize Dart in the way you have without giving any examples. I haven't found it to be trying to be powerful at all. For example it uses async-await, defaults to dynamic arrays and doesn't focus on classes as much as eg. Java. So I find it to be simple on all accounts. And the developers have specifically stated that their intention with the language is to be as intuitive as possible with the smallest amount of surprises. And I've found that to be the case. I almost never need to actually look at the documentation. Meanwhile I always find myself in MDN looking at some strange JS API (`Date`, for example) despite using it for much longer. And don't even get me started on Java.
