No. Quite awake actually. JavaScript opens up a world of possibilities you cannot do with just HTML. It's the current platform of the browser app. If you are happy with static websites, that's great. Most people are not.
I mean... you could replace javascript with any other programming language and achieve the same thing. The choice of javascript as the language with which to access the standardized APIs is arbitrary. Browsers could have equivalently chosen any other sufficiently similar language, like Lua or Python.
You can still do that. There are many languages that compile to Javascript though I never saw the point in those (mostly because I'm very comfortable with JavaScript as a language)