The fact that many (most?) people don't even know this is evidence that the problem is not JS, but rather the NPM subculture that draws attention to itself on social networking sites like GitHub, programmer Twitter, etc. That's just JS-the-language, though.
As far as "web tech" goes: Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape have depended on JS+DOM underpinning the main application for longer than some of the 20-something programmers who are doing web tech stuff have even been alive (let alone trying to be the next top package dev-influencer...)
People seem to have also forgotten the obsession with desktop "widget engines" (Konfabulator, Mac OS Dashboard, &c) that consumed lots of attention and energy during the latter part of whatever you call the decade from 2001–2010, which were precursors both to the aforementioned things and the sorts of single-purpose Electron apps that people sling around today.
These ideas are neither particularly, new, novel, or untested. (They're much closer to "entrenched", if we're going to call it anything.)
* or, in the case of Pop!_OS, TypeScript (that eventually gets compiled to JS and run on the Gnome fork of SpiderMonkey) <https://github.com/pop-os/shell>