I think with ES6 and newer things really cleaned up and now we’re left with avoidable ugly parts, of which every language has.

Before when you didn’t even have strict equality checking, for example, you were forced to know about implicit type casting.

Getting on the same page with modules also helped a lot. Typescript directly in Node is great. Look mom, no build system!! I’m just hoping one day browsers will accept TS the same way.

It's successful because it's been kept away from the kind of programmers who think the time spent to endlessly specify everything four times is nothing compared to the sadness of losing a byte or a cycle. These are the descendants of people who hundreds of years ago would have insisted that real work is in Latin. C++26 is available for them, or Node/React with hundreds of dependencies if they want JavaScript, or they can even compile and run whole operating systems into WASM now, or anything else. Just let JavaScript be the domain of people who do other things for fun.