Comment by lucumo

One of my software engineering maxims is that popularity is a feature.

I don't mean that in a "social proof" kind of way. Popularity brings it own advantages. Because lots of people use something, you get the advantages of lots of other people using it:

a larger ecosystem, more libraries, easier to find new team mates, easier to find people willing to learn, better and more answers on Stack Overflow (or in LLMs now, I guess), etc., etc.

And there's just no compiled languages more used and known than JavaScript/TypeScript. Java and C# come closest, but they're still far off and still require runtimes.