It's even easier to go with good old JavaScript now than back in 2007 because of all the tooling. We have profilers right in the browsers now. How cool is that!
Also don't forget that while CSS is still lame, it got few goodies as well, like CSS variables.
The only thing that I personally miss is how to set up Chrome to be a proper IDE. I know that I can edit files from the disk, it has autocomplete, but this whole UI is kind of weird. May be I just need some tutorial.