JavaScript was inspired by Scheme and Self. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing in that way. But yes, a Scheme would have solved so many issues and churn that we have to deal with. However people are scared by Lisps so there’s that.
Specifically, some manager at Mozilla was scared of it.
Er, why? Most of the churn isn't to do with JS as a language.
I think it's partly due to: people like regular garden-variety arrays and hashmaps, and don't want to use car, cdr, cons. I like my array and hashmap literals.
Maybe better everything or maybe a culture of (set! ...). everywhere, just like auto lisp :).
Saying this because I believe lost of the web crowd wasn't ready for function oriented programming at the time.