JavaScript is an interpreted language: write, run. No build steps required.

Building was introduced as a temporary measure, to handle cross-browser awkwardness (grunt and stuff like that). People overused it. We totally don't need it anymore. TypeScript is awesome but a major blocker to this return to a more nimbler ecosystem.

People in the 2000s discovered that mixing code with HTML tags was bad and big complexity demon mansion. By the end of the 2000s, this was fixed in the tools of that time. I consider JSX a best-practices regression. It feels like ASP.NET, but the kids don't notice because they have never seen ASP.NET.

For a while, we also saw npm as temporary. A better thing, more web-friendly, would appear. That never happened.

JavaScript could have been great.