Equality (and that portion of type coercion) is pretty much solved by using === and the rest of type coercion is solved by only using + when both sides are numbers or strings. I don't see how that gets as much ire as it does

> I don't see how that gets as much ire as it does

Because it's the straw-man.

I think you mean, when only looking at those things. Outside of hoisting, you just listed all of the issues. Even hoisting is only an issue when you start polluting the global namespace.

Depending on who you are you can also complain about scoping rules, the object model, semicolon insertion and more general syntactic complaints, speed, access to native APIs and so on. One language is never going to be all things to all people.