One man's trash is another man's legacy app transition project.

I've made decent money on helping those who were late to the party as someone who started out with AngularJS.

Fortunately everyone involved understood this meant a complete rewrite and all the wanted was people being able to read AngularJS code.

Fun times as Google was sounding the alarm for years already and Angular 2+ was also fairly mature.

Ten years of working corporate and contractor front end gigs and I’ve found that most companies are loathe to update unless there’s a feature they need from something more modern.

Normally I would agree, but that was a Solid three years after everyone else, when the idea was already mainstream (again).

For the most part, the class syntax in JS is just sugar over the top of Prototype based inheritance. It's not my preference, mostly in that it doesn't work well with too many layers of inheritance, and enhancement tends to work better imo. I'm also more in favor of a more functional/modular approach.

In terms of private members, you prefix # for that...

    class MyClass {
      #myValue = 6;
      ...
    }

Plenty of languages don't have a "standard library" including, for example, rust... there are benefits and disadvantages to this. The benefit is you also aren't stuck with a poor interface for certain things. You can use Deno/jsr std if you prefer.

As for the rate of development... abysmal is not the word I'd use. JS in general has been prolific to say the least and nearly exponential in pratice.

In terms of reinventing UI... if it's just a retread, then why is it there hasn't been a better cross-platform UI toolkit developed? You can do more with HTML+CSS in terms of layout than any other UI native toolkit and even then, most fall short and are limited to only one or two platforms. That doesn't even capture accessibility needs and requirements.

Weak dynamic typing I can somewhat agree with. However, given the origin of JS was mostly for input validation, it makes a twisted bit of sense. Just looking at how falsy behavior works in JS makes a lot of sense, the only minor outlier is 0, but that being falsy in nature comes more from other languages than the subject area of JS itself. I do think that sometimes dealing with undefined, undefined as a value and null is a bit of a pain, and kind of wish that the concept of Option<T> was more prevalent when JS was created.

In terms of your favorites, I've used C# since before the first release and am very familiar with it. There's a lot to like. That said, it doesn't stop the environments that use it from turning it into a twisted, byzantine mess of layers of abstraction and indirection that destroy every bit of performance it's capable of in the name of "Enterprise" practices. I also like the C# language. I just hate most of the C# codebases I've had the displeasure to work in. It's far from exclusive to JS.

They are wrong. NPM is the biggest open source repository ever created, if you judge it by the longtail it will obviously be bad. There are plenty of projects there that exists for 15+ years and have great backwards compatibility, like jquery.

Also, browser tech was changing very fast 10 years ago. Now it is quite slow and the JS ecosystem is consolidating the usage of modern features like ES modules, importmaps, web components.