It's funny because "javascript is bad" was common geek sentiment at the turn of the century. Now it is flamebait, or being caught up in the past [itself possibly a bit of a code for ageism]. Seeing this attitude change is one of the most interesting things I've seen in tech nerd circles in the last decade or so.

Can you elaborate on why it's funny? javascript (on it's own) has changed a lot in 20 years and it was originally designed in what, one week due to external time constraints? i think the criticisms are valid if $Your_favorite_language had ~4 days only for language design. From my recollection, there were no frameworks, no tooling, no linters, no jquery. it was a basically a primative language for browsers that had no compiler and didn't do anything useful (back in the 90's). About as exciting as VBA 1.0.

JavaScript was made to add a bit of interactivity to webpages. Like "click the button to expand the text". What is it now? There are whole javascript frameworks being made. Maybe soon web(sites) won't even use HTML anymore but rather render custom UI to a canvas. Browsers are new operating systems running on top OS. Lots of performance wasted by this. Yes, there are webapps using it wisely, although JS is often misused on sites which could have been plain html or html+ajax. In many cases CPU is not even doing much but some webs take 2 seconds or more until I start seing some graphical output after entering URL. It takes a lot of time to render templates and construct DOM. Pretty sad.

No i'm not a fan either. I'd much prefer a site the loads in <50ms.

It's funny to see attitudes change so dramatically is all I mean.

I think you may be blind to the harshest criticisms, though. It was a common view that the web was built for static content (or server-side dynamic content) and code execution by the client is mostly a nuisance at best. And there is some validity to that. When JS was developed, roughly contemporaneous with worse ideas like java applets and ActiveX on the web, it was thought by proponents that untrusted code execution is OK to good. 20 years later, it was still assumed that if JS is sandboxed, memory safe, has a different page table from the rest of user mode, untrusted code execution is safe. Then spectre and meltdown happened.

Yeah there's some hindsight there... but are you saying that views have gone full circle? Where are these attitudes changing? JS has historically been sandboxed better than Java Applets and ActiveX, which is one reason why it's popular now.

Nope, not saying they went full circle, just that they went from one extreme (client side code bad) to another (client side code as inevitable fact of life and why question that?).

And tangentially, I was pointing out more recently that the grumpy position from older times actually would have prevented some real world problems. (Spectre and meltdown go from being local privilege escalation bugs to "holy shit you can own my machine if I visit a web page")