Javascript used to be a more shit language.
It wasn't until Google sent out an arctic adventure team to find Lars, an ancient sage ice fisherman in Iceland, to develop the V8 javascript engine. Beautifully virtualized, compact, thoughtful. V8 runs in the heart of all these new age services because it's so damn fast. MongoDB, NodeJS.
Sure, Javascript has it's declarative, functional approach, which maybe wouldn't be the choice of many OOP veterans, but with prototypal inheritance and new ECMA6 features, it's really coming together. Arrow functions (lambdas), native async, native AMD with 'import' statement like python, good interpolation and templating, assignment by object restructuring, and syntactic sugar to make traditional class-based inheritance easier without having to extend objects yourself. It's getting pretty sexy.
And why shouldn't Javascript? I mean, I have the same objections as any programmer does: it's not compiled! it's interpreted! its weakly typed! it's declarative! Good objections, all.
But we know that Javascript is the lingua franca of the internet. Delivering serialized+compressed JSON is now the de-facto method for delivering easy to consume data, because everything understands JS.
Node is nice. Node is modular. Compartmentalized, fast. I recently converted a legacy project for an old client which was done in .NET MVC 5 -- making an MVC service in Node was a dream. It was so much faster. Like, ten times faster. So not only did I make $25,000 as a one time project fee, their legacy project actually got BETTER just because of node's low overhead.
JS is better with Typescript. Strongly typed classes, transpiles to normal JS.
And I agree that most devs who are like "i'm a javascript developer" are faggy starbucks sipping apple users. Who couldn't tell you what "prototypal inheritance" or an "interface class" is in the first place. But Node is honestly pretty cool. yaaa nigga spin up some docker instances on AWS and get yo chedda, shiet