I'm fine with Javascript development these days because I built my fundamentals years ago. I am not sure how comfortable I would be otherwise and when I meet people who are where I used to be, they often look lost.

I am also thinking about learning Android development and don't really know where to begin.

So everyone suffers when anything more complex than hello world already required third party libraries, specially ones that aren't even acknowledged by Google.

Also the Android operating system isn't a language.

If a company wants to vet all of their software, good on them! But that doesn't mean that anything that's not vetted by them is somehow worse for the majority of users, just that they haven't vetted it yet. So any arguments about how "library x" isn't usable by them won't apply to the vast majority of people, because most don't have that issue, or have no problems vetting that library as well.

Somewhat off topic. Is there a word that encompses the langauge, platform, runtime, etc...? I hate the word "ecosystem", but it seems like the best bet. And using any one of the others brings out comments of "well it's not a language" or "it's not a framework it's a library" or something else.

If you assume a roughly logarithmic intersection of shared dependencies that's O(N^2 log n) chances for a bug. But in some communities I'm sure even that is optimistic.