It's an interesting full circle, in some ways, as JavaScript was originally envisaged as "LiveScript" to run server side systems and quickly finished/renamed in a rush to capitalize on a quick need for browser capabilities.

It definitely is a super interesting progression. It's fairly pointless to theorize about counterfactuals, but I'm of the belief that if somebody had attempted to design a system with the intention, from the beginning, to do, in the browser, all we are now doing with JavaScript, that the result would have likely been an over-engineered failure, solving the wrong problems in the wrong ways. I think the utter failure of applets written in Java (a "proper" language) gives some credence to that hypothesis.