I mostly agree. But I don't think that JS and HTML (and CSS) are terrible for what they were meant to do, the problem is that what they were meant to do was lunacy in context. The core architecture of webpages got corrupted somewhere in their development.

What we wanted was a way to describe interactive hyperlinked documents backed by a distributed collection of servers. What we got was a virtual machine running on a virtual network. I would call the web the third generation of application layer and it's an even larger step back for some fundamental promises of computing (composition, interchangeability, others) than window managers were (second) from shells (first). Window managers gave us a better way to interact, but we lost things like piping applications together, easy to use environment variables, sharing other programs (most applications I install these days just ship with their own copies of everything; I blame Microsoft), etc. The web gives us cross-platform access anywhere features, but has terribly degraded any promise of applications working together unless they are owned by the same company. Not at all the shared interactive interlinked document layer we wanted.