For me, the beauty of JS was in its simplicity - there were wacky edge cases for sure, but here was a C-like language that you could use to build a project that almost anyone could understand. When Node first came out I was over the moon - wow, I can run processes on the machine from JavaScript?! Unreal.

It seems like I'm constantly keeping up with the complexity of the ecosystem, which is taking a toll on my productivity. This is probably my problem more than any specific failing of the evolution of the language, but, I like to ship.

Just my 2 cents to the discussion.