I feel very similarly to you regarding the position that JS is moving in.

I can only surmise that things are moving in this direction to lower the barrier to entry. As more developers are working with JavaScript it's easier to subscribe to tools to manage consistency than it is to educate and rely on developers' standards to create working efficient code.

Thinking back I've worked on some massive 'Web app' projects over the last 20 years, and the biggest I worked on didn't use much in the way of frameworks or libraries, and standards were maintained by peer review and documentation.

Typescript I suppose automates a lot of this, but I don't think that makes it better.