I find modern JS much simpler, much more terse. You don't have to carry `this` around like a chain, you have tight arrow/rocket functions, you avoid leaky scope with var and you have mutability control.

It's taken me from "this is a mess" to "ok I can work with this."

It sounds to me like you have a familiarity issue. When something changes drastically in something you're comfortable with it evokes a very strong natural rejection, because it's like someone's taking something away from you.

I agree with you for the most part. They keep adding more and more to the language and it is getting more and more bloated. It's becoming a chore to keep up with, and the added power isn't that necessary. Much of what they add is just making the language more terse. I do prefer the terseness once I get used to a new feature, but having to relearn javascript all the time is pretty annoying.

I really admire small and simple languages that don't change much over time. Lisps, SML, etc.

But once again, many of the improvements are quite nice once you learn them and get used to them. I wouldn't want to give up arrow functions, for example, now that I'm used to them.

Parts of it are overly verbose, but as a 1997 developer you're likely to understand that better. Have a play with a Lisp, or Python's functional aspects, or Haskell, then think about how you'd put those in JavaScript: chances are, you'll end up with a similar solution to what we have today.

Perhaps that is the problem. Other developers came into JS, since that was where the jobs/money was, but wanted JS to be like the languages they left behind. Instead of adding onto JS in a “JS”-way, they pushed to change it to more closely mimic their previous languages. Now JS feels to me like this strange thing is JS at the core with these non-JS things bolted on around the edges. Syntactic sugar, like Class, that makes people coming from OOP languages feel like JS really is an OOP language like they are used to, while under the hood it is the same as always.