You're wrong, it can be done productively, the evidence is the thousands (tens of thousands?) of such apps that exist on the web, most of which were written in regular JavaScript.
Whether its Google Web Toolkit/Java/C#-to-Javascript generators, Closure templating, Haskell/Clojure/etc. mini-languages, TypeScript, etc. (Job Ad Requirements are one of the great ways to see all this stuff)
When you start working on big applications (e.g. I worked for 5 years on a huge electronic HR application covering everything from timesheets to recruitment to content management to CRM with multi-country, multi-language, multi-regulatory, multi-company, multi-site, multi-thousand users requirements) you realise JavaScript has serious shortcomings...although I still really like the language the tooling and knowledge advances have really, really helped.