They did not come from JS. JS took them from Scheme. Scheme took them from ... lambda calculus? Anyways, not knocking on JS, but they did not invent lambdas by any stretch of the imagination. I do agree with the rest of your comment btw.
Lambdas predate JavaScript by decades. Basically according to your reasoning JS shouldn't exist. It was created by Netscape to compete in the web browser market with Microsoft script language the moment you had Python, Ruby, Pike etc. There were no afaik novel concepts to be found in JS.
I know JS gets a lot of hate on hn, but if you look at the history of a lot of modern pl paradigms, many of them got traction after years of ridicule because JavaScript brought them to the masses.
Face it - people use JS because the browser happened, not because it’s original in any meaningful way.
Even Clipper had support for closures.
Lambdas are actually so hipster that they were cool before we even had programming languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
As far as I know, Lisp was the first language to actually implement the idea. I actually struggle to think of any language concepts that were introduced by Javascript.
I also tend to disagree with the overall sentiment that new languages aren't a good way to influence programming. Haskell, for example, is quite a departure from a language like C. I don't think we would've ended up with the great, proven options we have today if everything was just incremental changes on some base. Sometimes you need to rethink things from scratch. It's part of the reason we don't have one language that fits perfectly for all problem sets.
There are plenty of interviews where he tells how C with Classes came to be.
Copy-paste compatibility with C is a burden on modern computing, but it was also what contributed to C++'s adoption during the early 90's.
With so many there is also a very low chance of any of them actually picking up because the useless ones drown out the C++es.
I think people should do what they want though. If you want to make a programming language you should, just don’t expect everyone to view your endeavors as useful.
As far as your fifth point goes, new languages aren’t a good way to influence programming in general. Stuff like lambdas weren’t born in some hipster language, they came from JavaScript. Because if you want to influence, you have to make sure people actually see your stuff.
That being said. Making a PL language is a much better use of your time than whining on HN.