Agreed. My hatred for JS arose from having worked with it in the late 90s/early 00s and it was really painful. I did everything I could to avoid it during the ensuing years, focusing mainly on back-end work.

Having circled back around to it recently due to full-stack work, I'm now also using TypeScript targetting ES2022, and things are much, much better.

I feel that ES6 was a game changer, it really brought about major improvements to the language.