I don't understand interest in dynamic languages. I have worked with them extensively, but I find them to be handicapped without benefit.

However, JS specifically was not designed at all to begin with, but just thrown together, and core concepts have stayed since this first iteration. These core concepts are its primary handicap.

Well, there are some use-cases where Julia is actually faster than compiled code due to being able to compile dynamically generated code on the fly (see https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-vs-fortran-complaint...)

But yes, in general the same lack of static guarantees that makes dynamic languages slow also makes code in dynamic languages hard to maintain. I think a lot of programmers tinker with code in dynamic languages and end up liking them as a result, but don't realize the difficulty of working in such a language in a much more complex codebase.

Usual suspects that many people who hate JS seem to champion are are python, lua, ruby.

I love Lua personally, but it has its own traps too. Never could get into Python too much, the indentation syntax is killing me :P

I hate JS with a passion (I worked with it professionally for years, and wrote crypto and compression algorithms, as well as an entire web browser sandbox), but my refuge is in static languages.

I no longer see dynamic languages useful for more than bash-like scripting where correctness is uninteresting. :/