Also, JavaScript...why are you the way you are? Does anyone have advice for learning it so it makes sense? I can't even get tutorial projects to run properly...
Because they didn’t want to train their JS developers and didn’t want to cause friction for new projects. They get to say they’re using TS, with basically none of the real advantages. (Apart from general rational error checking.)
I like Douglas Crockford’s talks about the “good parts” of JavaScript. They’re old and probably a bit outdated, but he explain quite well the history and why JavaScript is the way like it is.
It clicked for me when I saw them the first time. Still hate JavaScript though.
What Crockford did was enable a lot of devs to realize there was a viable development platform built into the most prolific and open network client in the world. For that he should be commended but it should have never been taken as "this is a viable general purpose language".
He also showed that JavaScript has more resemblance to functional programming languages rather than object oriented ones. If you try to treat it as an object oriented language like Java (like the seem to imply), you will have a bad time.
Can it even make sense tho? To me JS is an example of a not too good thing that people started too eagerly so now they're trying to make it make sense.
And that probably requires not going with a tutorial. Because the JS ecosystem scorns at "simple". Just make some HTML scaffold and use MDN to understand the DOM.