JSLint, JSHint, ESLint. Each of which built on the good aspects of its predecessor and evolved as new requirements came up. There are a _ton_ of tooling libraries for JavaScript. Just google "X JavaScript" for any tooling you'd expect, and you'll usually have several options. Of course, on the flip side, people will complain that there are too many options. Blah blah blah. No matter what the JS community does, people will criticize.

Then you haven’t seen anything yet. x)

There are tons of tools, of course also including jslint, debuggers (e.g. IntelliJ, dunno about others). There are editors and even IDEs. Then there’s the problem of bringing (NPM) modules to the browser using tools like webpack or SystemJS or whatever. There are general purpose build/automation systems like gulp. There are transpilers that “compile” ES6 to ES5. For any given task, you can probably find at least five programs that do it.

And if you look at all the topics, you’ll find that library management makes up only a small fraction of everything.

> does javascript even have a linter?

Yes, thousands of them, npm alone has 1200 results for linter:

https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=linter

> does javascript even have a linter? -- or debugging

Yes, as libraries. There are multiple linter options that can be installed with a project. Debugging is available, usually through an IDE or browser.

JS has several linters, although ESLint is the one to pick if you're looking for one.