Except C actually NEEDS building whereas JS do not. But then using all of these command-line tools makes JS start to look more like a 'real' programming language and now any noob can't just walk in and take my job since I obfuscated the hell out of something essentially simple.

It is simple Machiavellian protectionism applied at rapid pace. Back in the day it was done within the purposely obscure UNIX environment (not just anyone can be sysadmin!) and now its being re-applied to web environment.

How selfish of us. I suppose we'll all go back to managing our dependencies by manually downloading them, 'modularising' everything as global variables, etc, etc.

And you're still missing the point. All these tools do different things (or rather, several different overlapping groups of things - build/compilation, static analysis, etc). C doesn't need to be linted. It doesn't need sophisticated memory profiling. Your code will compile without lint or valgrind. Yet these things might help. Both C and JS are full of opportunities for wanton self injury.

Nobody would pretend that the tooling landscape in JS is perfect - but surely this is just a side effect of a lot of very basic language affordances (modules, etc) being missing from the core language, given that it was designed in a hurry without a huge amount of ambition behind it. Very well, we're stuck with it, and get along as best we can.

Cool down guys, it was just a joke. No need to start a war.