[simple10]

Perhaps the attraction has to do with the large end user base more than its lower barrier of entry for devs.

Javascript is the one language you can learn and easily deploy anywhere... web, apps, server, etc. This attracts a lot of new devs and the ecosystem tries to fix inherent language limitations with new tools. i.e. It's not the best language to write an app in but you can make it work with a lot of extra tooling. But then the tooling will need to keep evolving to try to keep shrinking the pain points and limitations of the language itself.

Another huge factor is how fast browser and Node standards and APIs change, making older tooling redundant or obsolete. e.g. jQuery isn't really needed as a polyfill in browsers anymore.

[strife25]

Exactly! It’s a crazy diverse user base too.

The needs of designers creating a marketing site and engineers working on a real web app are different, but they all work with web tech.