I for one consider that a feature - it is easy enough to write bad code in JS as it is, so anything that encourages defensive coding and solid unit/functional tests is very appropriate for this particular language.

A crash certainly draws attention to a problem much better than an error in a log that no one usually looks at.

Yes it's a pain, but you deserve it for writing buggy code and then not catching it in testing (that's what I keep saying to myself, anyway). ;)