Of course it’s nice to think what if JS would be LISPy, but I think most probably it wouldn’t be adopted so widely as it is now.
I've written some Lisp and I don't find the syntax hard to read, so much as my unfamiliarity with the language itself (what does cons do? What kind of args does it take?).
Plus the occasional cluster migraine when I decide to write a macro, knowing that I'm lucky when regular code runs right the first time. Not really a fault of Lisp, I'm sure me trying to write C++ templates would end about the same.
Er, my experience is that Lisp or Scheme is taught in literally every CS course out there. Not high-school maybe, but then again in high-school you typically don't get Java either - maybe Scratch, maybe Python.
I know on HN it's fashionable to be pro-LISP, but "it's not taught" is not one of the reasons LISP is not popular.
I've worked with more people that know Haskell than Lisp (though that seems like an outlier, I would guess Lisp/Scheme is still more popular than Haskell).
It's totally possible that I'm an outlier or that it's regional, but I haven't seen any indication that Lisp is commonly known.
For example, CoffeeScript was everywhere about 10 years ago. If someone had told me then that in 5 years it would be dead, and in 10 years new devs would not have even heard of it, I wouldn’t have believed it. CoffeesScript died largely because JS adopted most of the innovations Coffee brought to the table in ES2015/ES6, thus Coffee became unnecessary.
Still, JS has come a long way in the past 10 years, which is impressive. When I need to write JS, I’m glad the days when I needed to use Underscore just to get map, reduce, etc. are long gone.
But regardless of the historical reasons, JavaScript is now an extremely popular programming language for non-web applications.
Lisp-style programming with s-expressions is just not very popular. Pure (or "pure-ish") functional programming in general just isn't.
I know some people really like functional programming and/or scheme, but the reality of the matter is that this never has been (and I suspect never will be) a mainstream opinion.
Functional programming is the Black Metal of programming. It's great and all, but will always be for a relatively small and niche audience.
And that's okay. Not everything needs to be large.
Semantic markup languages were niche until the web happened. Objective-C was a weird niche language until the iPhone app boom. People learn the languages they need to learn.