This is super interesting. But why isn't HTML or CSS a similar mess? I found their structure to be more logical than JS. Parts of JS feels like it's intended as a backend language but parts of it don't.
Really? I find that css is pretty much the ugly part of html. Html is no worse than markdown or latex. If you just wrote plain HTML and were okay with how it rendered, you would have nicely structured code.
My point is that if you only use the parts that don't bring confusion you have a problem... Nobody ever does that in production... Much less with any frameworks. There is no such thing as semantic html at scale or in any modern framework.
That isn't the fault of the language though. It does what it was designed to well. Maybe it is I'll suited to achieve things it wasn't designed to do?
I could absolutely write code to do data analytics with C and gnuplot, does that mean they're the appropriate tools for doing that when pandas, SPSS, Julia or matlab exists? Probably not.