JavaScript wasn't really a DSL though was it? Not in the sense of this article. Brendan Eich was hired to embed Scheme into Netscape Navigator. That's not the same as the kind of crippled templating languages this article is discussing.
I don't think that this is a true comparison. JavaScript was limited mostly by its sandboxing, not what you could write in it. You can't really compare that to what HCL is and does.