I'm glad I'm not alone with these feeling.

I was there when Macromedia took JS as their scripting language for animating GIFs. People soon started doing silly things and everyone realized it was not fit for the task. We had AS2 which added some syntactic sugar and was the exact same thing as early Typescript - an escape hatch that allowed you to use OOP while the resulting code was still just plain old JS.

But meanwhile Macromedia worked on a whole new thing called AS3. It was codified as ES4 and it's the reason why JS had all these "private", "abstract" keywords reserved.

Heck, we even had redtamarin for running AS as console! And there was Alchemy which is grandfather of WASM.

We were that close to having a compiled JS++.

But times were different, we were still in the middle of browser wars, and the standard was eventually scrapped because noone was interested in JS at the time.

And then Apple decided to kill Flash.

And for some reason the community decided to burn the library of Alexandria and spend the next 10 years on reinventing the wheel.

Sure, V8 is a world wonder, no question about it, the fact that JS can run that fast is just amazing. And people finally wrapped their head around TS and realized that types are useful. Wonderful. But I really think that we've lost 10 years running in circle and producing smart looking docs while tech is slowly getting back where it was 15 years ago.