For me, the beauty of JS was in its simplicity - there were wacky edge cases for sure, but here was a C-like language that you could use to build a project that almost anyone could understand. When Node first came out I was over the moon - wow, I can run processes on the machine from JavaScript?! Unreal.
It seems like I'm constantly keeping up with the complexity of the ecosystem, which is taking a toll on my productivity. This is probably my problem more than any specific failing of the evolution of the language, but, I like to ship.
A "C-like language" is a very dubious compliment. Fortunately, JS is built around a different core. Unfortunately, it's built as haphazardly as C has been.
What I mean is that its syntax is classical. Its constructs will be very familiar to those who have taken basic education in modern programming.
As far as your 'different core' argument I'm not too sure what you mean. If you're a Node dev, then JS is just your means of calling OS routines and giving work to threads (in C under the hood, to be sure). If you're a front end person, then JS is a very high level layer again, making calls various OS services, probably in C++ or C.
I'm pretty sure the "core" reference refers to the "FP with OOP" core based on Scheme and Self, which is one of the best things about the (JS) language.
Alas, "The Management" demanded that it be dressed up to look like Java (and thus like C++). This led to a bunch of people that were unhappy that Javascript was in fact NOT like Java when they tried to use it like Java.
It's a very nice dynamic FP language, but people keep wanting to do static OOP with it :-(
It seems like I'm constantly keeping up with the complexity of the ecosystem, which is taking a toll on my productivity. This is probably my problem more than any specific failing of the evolution of the language, but, I like to ship.
Just my 2 cents to the discussion.