[h84ru3a]

Walled gardens, which are just another annoyance in a long line of progressive manipulation of the computer user for profit, together with an increasing lack of responsiveness (despite ridiculously powerful hardware), drove me back to UNIX, assembly, FORTH and C. In some strange way I'm thankful for the annoyances of "modern computing" because I realised there is still so much more to learn about the "old stuff". I don't consider this move back to the old school to be "tinfoil hat", although it certainly can be used for that purpose. I just like being able to understand and control the machine, and having it be consistently responsive.

I can definitely sympathise with the OP. But I have little motivation to learn Javascript. It is a workaround to get a little control through the browser, but it is still browser-centric and has so little power relative to lower level languages. It is not a long-term solution to the problem the OP describes.