A lot of JS is nuts, but most of its basic behaviour that makes it not a good backend language make it an alright scripting language for the web specifically. I wish we would've used something tcl-y instead though, it's much cleaner and the "everything is a string"-ness makes sense for a fundamentally text based medium (the web)
If you drop-in replaced JS today with Lua, you'd have a conceptually similar language with a lot of warts chopped off. Backend devs can just cope with 1-based indexing though.
