I've been a professional JS developer for a few years, doing both in-browser and node-based automation stuff (never desktop apps in JS though, thankfully). What I mean is that while new JS revisions are trying to catch up and become somewhat pleasant to write in, there's still tons of baggage of bad decisions from the past that make this language simply awful when compared to basically any other popular language - and those aren't stagnating either.
Just in order to retain your sanity, you need to use several layers above JS to transpile your code - like JSX when you do UI or TypeScript when you do... well, anything.
I believe that JS is considered easy only because you can get your first impressive results very quickly when combined with HTML and CSS, which makes it easy to not lose your focus when learning. That might make it a good language to learn in, say, primary school on IT lessons - of course, only if there weren't other, better suited stuff available targeting these cases specifically already. Anything else actually makes JS harder than, say, Python. Or Go. Or C#. Or Java. Or even C++ with Qt (although C++ is easily second worse). Or Rust. There's just so much stuff you have to keep in your head while writing JS, it's not worth it. But you have to let go of "I know it, so I'll use it, no matter how well suited it is" mentality, and that can be challenging.
> Anything else actually makes JS harder than, say, Python.
It depends on the setup. I use CoffeeScript 2 which gives me most of what I miss from Python (which was my favorite language for years). And when I go back to Python I miss having a debugger as good as Chrome's, as well as some CS2/ES6 features.
> There's just so much stuff you have to keep in your head while writing JS, it's not worth it.
Just in order to retain your sanity, you need to use several layers above JS to transpile your code - like JSX when you do UI or TypeScript when you do... well, anything.
I believe that JS is considered easy only because you can get your first impressive results very quickly when combined with HTML and CSS, which makes it easy to not lose your focus when learning. That might make it a good language to learn in, say, primary school on IT lessons - of course, only if there weren't other, better suited stuff available targeting these cases specifically already. Anything else actually makes JS harder than, say, Python. Or Go. Or C#. Or Java. Or even C++ with Qt (although C++ is easily second worse). Or Rust. There's just so much stuff you have to keep in your head while writing JS, it's not worth it. But you have to let go of "I know it, so I'll use it, no matter how well suited it is" mentality, and that can be challenging.