Javascript has had zero barriers in becoming what it is, specifically because people are afraid to attempt to unseat it. there has never been an adult in the room willing to ask “is spending several hundred thousand person-years on this hack of a language better than starting over with something that is more thought out?” Of course it would be better to replace it, especially so in the early days when people saw what was coming.

everyone just continues doing what they are doing on the assumption that either JS is the best that humans can come up with, or that it’s too difficult to unseat it. both are ways of saying “i don't want to think about that problem right now.”

so then someone made the simultaneously laziest and most expensive decision ever: put JS on the server, too. now the code serving the client and the client itself get one thread each. “gosh, performance isn’t great here, but i don’t want to think about that, i have a sprint goal.”

it is only recently that WASM became a thing, and adoption seems slow. it has only succeeded because it did not try to usurp JavaScript’s position, and even requires JavaScript code to interact with the page content or the user in any way. if you can’t beat ‘em, or don’t want to try, join ‘em.

JS has hit zero barriers and has never been strenuously challenged at all. if it had, it would be gone. everyone just keeps throwing money at it because they don't want to think about how awful it is.

Only Google attempted it with Dart, and then they got tired and gave up, because the team was (presumably) minuscule compared to the team working on JavaScript in the same effing browser.