Right, I would generally prefer JS over Clojure on the server side these days. Or, rather, I would default to JS and then possibly disqualify it based on my needs (like team composition).

I spent over three years using Clojure and eventually learned how unimportant technical superiority is for most of my projects. For example, the first time I met a co-founder and they simply weren't interested in using Clojure. Well, that was easy.

JS has major upsides like ubiquity and I'm-already-using-it-in-the-browser and its simple concurrency model that aren't so easy to paint over.

I'm not saying everybody should default to JS like I do. But I think a lot of these avoid-JS-at-all-costs posts need to update their intel. For example, JS has pretty great static analysis compared to anything I've used in the other dynamically-typed languages. It's also one of the few where gradual typing actually caught on.

For all its upsides, its warts aren't any worse than things like the overuse of metaprogramming in Ruby or the aversion to FP in Python or the tooling dependencies of Clojure.