You can. Rollercoaster tycoon was originally written in pure ASM.
Allowing programming to be more widespread is a noble cause, but there comes a point (and I think it is approaching rapidly) where you layer so much abstration between the machine and the programmer, that they're guaranteed to write poor, or at least slow code. We need to find a middle ground, and I think javascript pulls in the wrong direction to this.
Like Lotus 1-2-3 as well, and lots of other software back in the 8 and 16 bit days.
That's one way to see it.
Another is that we don't erase them: we put them to use so programming can be more widespread, easier and more ambitious in scope.
(E.g. you cannot practically write a 10.000.000 line program in ASM, whereas you can in C. Or you cannot have everyone be able to write a 200 line high level program that does something complex in C, but you can in Python).