While it certainly has good points besides platform ubiquity, if you were trying to derive an equivalent of big-O for the popularity of javascript, language level criticisms and acclamations would count as, at best, linear concerns, where platform ubiquity is an exponential concern.

Platform ubiquity is so completely important in the determination that all other concerns can be ignored entirely.

Given a choice of supporting half of systems in javascript, and all systems in brainfuck, people would begin writing brainfuck-targeting compilers immediately.

All the cool programmers use CoffeeFuck.

Many languages have these things.

The problem is this spurious inference drawn from package count to language superiority. In reality what's popular is targeting browsers, and there simply aren't any other languages with first-class support by browsers no matter how much we want them. This isn't a matter of Javascript being better than everything else, it's a matter of historical accident and network effects.