15 years ago? the ES4 stuff happened in 2009-2010. that was 5 years ago.
As for whether the failure of ES4 was Microsoft's fault, no it wasn't. It was ES4's fault. Microsoft and Douglas Crockford merely pointed out the irreconcilable mistakes in design in ES4. The last thing Javascript needed was more bungled up mistakes and weird things in it. In particular, the issues with ES4 were around the packaging system and how it combined with namespaces. Upon close examination the design, lifted straight out of actionscript, just wasn't going to work on an ASYNCHRONOUS web.
Works fine in a binary blob of flash all downloaded in one go. But when you have to download individual files separately all hell would break loose.