The JavaScript ecosystem is made worse by the legions of "developers" in it which amount to bro-velopers that put no thought into if something is needed before they create it. There's a strong overlap between the idiots in crypto and JavaScript developers that needs to be decoupled drastically.
I forgot where I heard this, but at one point around the same time, Microsoft was trying to get BASIC embedded into webpages for Internet Explorer as a competitor to JavaScript.
What do you mean going to? Internet Explorer supported VBscript, which was a "competitor" to Javascript. Though being locked to ie was a hindrance to adoption. That, and it was based on vb.