[_bxg1]

JavaScript started out as a sort of "Java-flavored Scheme", actually

However, I'd say that modern JavaScript - the language - is much more like C++ than Lisp. It isn't a void of shepherding, so much as shepherding-by-committee.

However, due to how easy its ecosystem has made package management (in contrast with C++), much of that quagmire has been papered over with much more strongly-opinionated (shepherding) frameworks and dialects. This hasn't completely solved the "C++ problem", but it's gone a long way towards mitigating it. Working in modern JavaScript may be wildly different between frameworks, but it's reasonably consistent between projects that use the same frameworks.

[DeathArrow]

In other programming languages there is a consistency between frameworks and a default way to do things: there's no shitload of frameworks each reinventing the same wheel.

Some things are easy doable without frameworks.

In Javascript land you don't learn the language, you learn frameworks. And, some "JS frameworks" like Angular do not even promote JS, due to how terrible the language is.

If your current framework goes out of fashion in favor of the next shiny thing, you are out of luck.

I am unfortunate enough to having had to learn one of JS frameworks because our web apps are APIs in the backend and I have to do the frontend too and people who started the projects were fans of a particular JS framework.

For upcoming projects I'll use Blazor after it becomes production ready, no more JS frameworks for me.

I don't dislike JS, I quite enjoyed old-school ES6 + jquery. I even like Vue because is very customizable. I have a strong dislike for big opinionated frameworks like Angular.