I really like the evolution of JS over the past two decades. I strongly believe the evolution of JS revolutionized the web in a positive way and significantly boosted innovation by lowering the costs for application development. For example, every corporate app these days is a web app, which is much easier to manager from an IT perspective than OS applications. Shipping working code at scale has never been easier. In my relatively short career I've seen consumers and organizations adopt innovative new applications at an accelerating rate because of this.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. JS is so easy that it also makes it easy to write bad code. Higher-level languages also consume a lot more resources. Browsers become the defacto OS (good / bad?), etc. But in general I think JS has been revolutionary and the benefits far outweigh the costs from a functional perspective.

As for the article: jQuery receives to little praise imo. At the time it was truly revolutionary. Suddenly you could make your websites interactive with just a few lines of code, and it worked in every browser! This inspired an entire generation of web developers.