JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush.

"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.

There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.

And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.

Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.

Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.