> the moral panic about JavaScript on the web is endless because some jerks are out there doing it wrong

To be fair, the language allows them to do it wrong by default with all that implicit type conversion and whatnot -- even in the original equality operator! You can write good JavaScript, but you have to purposefully avoid weird behavior that just isn't present in some other modern languages like Python and Ruby. JavaScript had a weird history, got expanded upon accidentally (i.e. through some browser vendor or another deciding to implement something) many times, and has always valued backwards compatability more than languages that feel comfortable expecting the user to install the relevant runtime.

Python has

    > a = 100
    > a is 100
    True
    > a = 1000
    > a is 1000
    False

CPython stores integers above 256 as individual pieces of data, but a normal Python script doesn't. I think it's technically undefined behavior.

People complain about c all the time. Javascript is 20% footgun.

People totally blame C (and C++). There's entire classes of use-after-free and buffer flow errors not possible in other languages, which is what leads to people advocating for Rust or Go (or ADA for that matter, though it's obviously not popular anymore).