Eh, it's hard to talk about JavaScript because of all the different layers. My personal take is: JavaScript itself (ECMAScript) is an ugly and flawed but clearly generally productive language; Node is a work of art; NPM is horrendous with near-to-no redeeming qualities. TypeScript redeems lots of the problems with JavaScript, and I'm hopeful that Deno will ameliorate a lot of the problems with NPM (Yarn is good for what it is, but barely covers 3% of the necessary changes).

Also, an honorary mention for ESBuild (and the lesser-known SWC, extremely similarly optimal but eking out a small win due to Rust's advantages over Go). Both of them are terrific improvements over the extant tooling.