The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic

It's definitely opinion (and I certainly don't spare VB from criticism--it draws more fire than JS in my article!). But I am curious in hearing a bit more about your opinion on JS. Because there are so many pain points in it. So much that someone can write a book about "The Good Parts of JS" and its shortness becomes a meme. Now, TypeScript and other refinements address some issues, but JS certainly makes it easy to write some bad code, especially if you're not an experienced coder. The OOP is particularly clunky. Not to hate on JS--it's wildly successful, but would we really have picked it as a favorite language if it wasn't already built into browsers for scripting?