> I would consider C++ to be way more verbose than Javascript.

Rather damning with faint praise there.

> Weird scoping? What are you talking about here? It's not the same as other languages. That does not make it weird.

Yes it does. In the '80s this was an open research area, but a consensus was reached in favour of lexical scoping for a reason.

> I get that Javascript has its quirks. But so do most languages.

False equivalence. Python (to pick an example I'm familiar with) has some quirks, sure, but it's a million times nicer to program in than Javascript, and it has all the other advantages you list (it's easy to get started with, suitable for complex apps, cross-platform and so on). I'm sure the same could be said for Ruby or OCaml or hundreds of other languages. If it were as easy to run these in the browser, I don't think we'd see anyone choosing Javascript - it really is a worse language than so many alternatives.

(I mean, by the standards of a single-application scripting language that was written in three days, Javascript is very good - we wouldn't expect such a language to be the equal of a carefully designed general-purpose programming language)