Have you ever looked at the original JS implementation? It looks nothing like what JS is today. Saying the bones were spat out in a couple weeks is like saying Linux was developed in a few months.

And yet working groups have spent literal decades trying to make JS less shitty. The fundamental basics of JS can't be changed in backwards incompatible ways without breaking a huge number of websites. The Linux comparison is just wrong because Linux has broken backwards compatibility to fix problems. A better comparison would be Linux's policy to never break userspace. Backwards incompatible changes to JS would break a bajillion websites, much like breaking userspace would break a bajillion programs.

TS transpiles to JS, and any JS is valid TS. Take any TS, remove the types (and some syntactic sugar) and you have JS. I feel like if you like TS but not JS, you just don’t like loosely typed languages. That’s just a preference. It doesn’t make a language bad.

JS is valid TS. TS is not valid JS. This is the fundamental point. TS essentially fixes issues that JS cannot fix without breaking the world.

Loose typing is fine if the language's type system isn't insane. I prefer static typing, but as long as the type system is coherent, it's not an issue.

TBH IMO the only reason JS became popular is because it was provided by web browsers, and if you wanted to make your site do anything complex, you thus needed to use JS. This eventually led to the JS VMs being very fast, so Node was created, and now it's all over since you can learn one language for web and server.