Loved? Well, it's a point of view. I personally hate it, due to the tooling and the dependency management (npm and yarn are catastrophic, an "hello world" example with React downloads on average more than 100 packages).
[1] - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dr...
In the end, it isn't the best choice for many things, but it's good enough for most things. As such, it's what I tend to reach for first, since getting something working takes less time, and gets in my way so much less. Windows, Mac, Linux via Node, Electron, Carlo (node + installed chrome), not to mention Cordova (iOS/Android) and React Native. Best of all, I don't have to deal with a lot of issues seen in other platform specific tools.
It's so much closer to write once, run everywhere with less friction than anything else that has been done in computing. Aside from trivial projects.
HA! maybe this is technically true, because in the end that's where it runs, but have you looked in your modules folder at any substantial project lately?
The dependencies run deep and they run wide...
Having someone like Google steward a "standard" library (and it could even be distributed using NPM), would pretty much bring JS dependency management at par and beyond Java or C#.
Why is that bad? It's a huge waste of effort, increases the burden on anyone who's maintaining a package using those micro-libraries, and will guarantee more unpatched security vulnerabilities and unmaintained packages in the long run.