What I mean is that its syntax is classical. Its constructs will be very familiar to those who have taken basic education in modern programming.

As far as your 'different core' argument I'm not too sure what you mean. If you're a Node dev, then JS is just your means of calling OS routines and giving work to threads (in C under the hood, to be sure). If you're a front end person, then JS is a very high level layer again, making calls various OS services, probably in C++ or C.