I was first exposed to it in detail prototyping a machine learning project for Brendan Eich, which is now a part of Brave's browser. JS has obvious defects, but it is amazingly handy and a very good design with good compromises. The tooling and community is excellent of course, though it is a real abuse of JS to try to write ML algorithms in it. But it could have been a language of data science instead of R, had it come in a different era.