Before JavaScript embraces lambdas, everyone thought they were a bad idea. You could say something similar about jit.
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.
Python had lambda in 1994. JS didn’t even exist then.
Face it - people use JS because the browser happened, not because it’s original in any meaningful way.
JS didn’t invent lambdas, it made them popular. Or is it just a coincidence that every major language that didn’t have them, adopted them after they got real use in JS?
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.