Comment by idle_zealot

Also worth considering: there's a wider range of "acceptable" output programs when dealing with such forgiving scripting languages. If asked to output C then there are loads of finicky bits it could mess up, pointer accesses, writing past the end of an array, using uninitialized memory, using a value it already freed, missing a free, etc. All things that the language runtime handles in Python or JS. There's a higher cognitive load it needs to take on.