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The language is only popular because it has a monopoly in the browser, there are no alternatives to JS. We are all held hostage by it.

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There was a time when there were options and they died out because they weren’t as popular. VBScript and JScript to name a couple. Java is still around but I haven’t seen an applet in probably over a decade. Flash was a thing.

Never forget that the killshot to the back of Flash's head wasn't the technology itself being bad, but Apple's total refusal to support it on iPhones. Now the only thing keeping an entire generation worth of games alive is the Flashpoint Archive.

As much as I miss Newgrounds and grew up with Flash games, and used Flash for lots of art projects, it needed to go. The list of high score CVEs for Flash is 74 with a CVE score of 9 or higher. A decent number were exploits that made use of being able to execute code.

I don’t blame Apple for that decision, honestly. And I’m sure security wasn’t apple’s only reason of course, I’m not going to be naive about that. All around, we may be better off without it. It will also be missed - both can be true.

But there's plenty of transpilers: ClojureScript, Nim, etc.

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