“And now that you can use JavaScript instead of AppleScript”
You really can’t. JXA is garbage, crippled, incompetent, and long since abandoned to pine for the fjords. Its only actual function is to impede any re-development of ES6 as a useful scripting platform within Apple, and probably hinders 3rd-party alternatives such as Scriptable and ScriptKit, because what 3rd-party dev wants to be pre-emptively Sherlocked by garbage like that?
Apple abandoned AppleScript and AppleEvent-based automation after they gave the Mac Automation team multiple opportunities to make it successful—and they failed every one. Thus Apple fairly concludes it is a failed product on a legacy platform, ceases work on it because what’s the point on throwing more good money after bad, and looks elsewere for something new and more promising to try next.
Hence Shortcuts, which started out as a 3rd-party iOS app, Workflow. As a technology it is at best mediocre; as a polished, well-presented, and properly-sold product it was already moving up on iOS with positive customer response. Instantly far more promising than the inept, lethargic, and generally couldn’t-sell-icecones-in-a-desert Mac Automation team, where the critical failure was never the technology itself but purely PEBKAC; but an organization the size of Apple doesn’t care about that distinction, only about its results.
Thus, not too long after finally shitcanning the Mac Automation team in 2016, Apple bought up @WorkflowHQ outright, and have been positioning Shortcuts, née Workflow, for its true purpose: to provide their Siri UI with a reasonably granular, accessible, plugin backend so that Siri can actually make itself useful.
…
Lesson here for y’all: It does not matter one whit how good (or not) your technology is. (Apple themselves taught me that.) What matters is how good you are at selling product, i.e. putting bums on seats, and keeping them there.
That’s why AppleEvent technology (which is in many ways far superior) now rots in history’s dustbin, while Apple gives the [Siri-backed and Siri-backing] Shortcuts its opportunity to prove itself a successful product and future of Apple Automation.
Could a successful merging of the two produce a product 100× better? Sure. But if you’re asking that and not understanding why most likely won’t/can’t happen, you’re not understanding how successful big business works. My personal work (github.com/hhas/) testifies to hard lessons learned. (Though if you wish to have a crack, fill your boots. Perhaps you’ll do a better job n’me.)