Interestingly enough, in Python, the minimal, official style guide of PEP 8 actively suggests using properties (the equivalent of the JS getter/setter syntax) for simple things: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#designing-for-inhe... (See the section that starts with "For simple public data attributes, it is best to expose just the attribute name, without complicated accessor/mutator methods.")

I think in practice this ends up being mostly a function of what's idiomatic in the ecosystem. The most common JS style guide recommends _against_ using getters and setters, so it would be surprising for something in JS to do so. The most common Python style guide recommends _for_ using properties, so the syntactical near-equivalent ends up being something "expected".