I think your unstated assumption is that everything you describe shows that JavaScript is broken. I feel your pain, but a lot of your complaints show just how successful JavaScript really is.

It has libraries to abstract away differences in the underlying platforms -- obscures the miracle that it basically works on different platforms, even written by bitter competitors. What was the last language to do that? C? Perl?

It allows the programmer to create new abstractions like jQuery -- again, this is because of the good parts. It's highly dynamic. Even if JavaScript had all of jQuery from day one, people would still be writing frameworks to reach the next level of abstraction.

As for languages that treat JavaScript as assembly; well, it depends. Sometimes the motivation is to write better applications -- like, people want to define server-client communication at a higher level, or use similar representations of the same concepts on server and client. But that's more of a flaw of the browser (or server) platform, not JavaScript the language. It wouldn't be fixed if we suddenly had python in the browser as a viable scripting language.

The last category are people who treat JS as assembly because it's missing features, as a language, like types, or asynchronous communication, or internationalization. Now these really do show where the flaws in the language are, in my opinion. Some of this is being addressed in newer versions of the language.