Javascript has first class functions. It has closures. it has nice object/literal syntax. If you don't consider it cheating to use a library, it does have macros if you use sweet.js. It has a metacircular evaluator, from the very beginning called "narcissus", and if it had homoiconicity, it would be even more direly hated than it is now. Having syntax, for better or worse, is a strength that means that people actually use the language. For reals. Not just that one time at college.
The real question is how are any of those features actually useful from anywhere but a theoretical purity standpoint? We're not exactly writing AI systems here. At the end of the day the language is there to write programs. And the sophistication of the programs you need to write in javascript doesn't really need those things most of the time.