By any measure except by comparison to a hypothetical counterfactual universe, I think javascript is one of the most successful programming languages of all time, and one that has added more to the world than almost any other.

It's like standards: some have better performance characteristics than others, some are more elegant, and so on. But the the best standard is the one everybody actually uses, because that is the greatest value a standard can provide.

You could say "all that is true, but let's drop JS tomorrow and replace it with something even better," and I guess that's true. It's also true of English, and money, and shoes. Even though I'm on HN wasting time instead of working, that kind of fantasizing seems like a pointless exercise.