"crockford himself" has done great things fo Javascript but he's also not the last word on it. He himself admits that some of his ideas about JavaScript were wrong and resulted from his pre Javacript baggage. E.g. The model he suggests for conventional inheritance in "The Good Parts" does not, iirc, actually work as advertised and in any event isn't needed.

The interesting thing to me about JavaScript is that insofar as it lacks "crucial" language features it turns out to provide the necessary tools to build them yourself. Exactly gow do you want inheritance or modules or whatever to work? E.g. While JavaScript doesn't impose a module structure it's very easy to come up with one, and because you build it yourself you can tweak it to deal with your exact needs rather than adhering mindlessly to "patterns" developed for working around the shortcomings of more tightly defined languages (Java, cough)

Java programmers moving to JavaScript seem to write horrible code because the freedom to actually just do stuff rather than build boxes with tiny weird-shaped holes cut in them to package pieces of functionality is so alien.

I wish Python, with its (fewer) warts were as ubiquitous and useful as JavaScript, but it's not, and Javascript is pretty darn good.