Man, I had a lot of fun reading this. As a primarily front-end developer, I can sympathize with what you’re saying, and it’s a good reminder of how insane anyone has to be to choose front-end development.

One of the things that makes Javascript so bizarre is its origin story. When you look at its humble beginnings as a simple scripting language for Netscape (👴) browsers, to the early attempts to make browser content dynamic, to the infamous Browser Wars of the 90’s and Aughts, to the attempts to codify through committee, and you get a culture that’s pretty freewheeling and evolutionary. You’ll see all sorts of dead ends and convergences and a lot of chaos. But it’s sure creative!

As for Node’s ascendancy, that was something of a fluke. They were one of the first servers to really take on a performant functional programming architecture, and it killed every other app server out there in terms of performance and memory footprint.

Since then it’s gotten bloated, the way apps do when too many people ask for too many things. But it has that luster from before, so people keep using it.

Seriously, lambdas and Go are so much better for microservice architectures. (It absolutely helps that the same company created both!) But it’s pretty amazing how a buggy language for 1980’s script kiddies has become such a dominant force.