JS is fine, it’s more that people overdo it and bundle their heavy, deeply layered frameworks with thousands of npm dependencies for the web. Often times analytics/tracking/ad libraries are a major contributor of bloat, I once shrunk down a package-lock from thousands of lines to a few hundred just by stripping the telemetry libraries from an open-source app.

Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes it’s a static page, sometimes a server-rendered dynamic page and sometimes a single-page application, all of those can be made performant.

Having the ability to overload functions or constructors without a million Stuff::with_x variants is something I consider more ergonomic and not unsafe. I know the Rust community prefers explicitness in many places, but explicitness and safety are somewhat orthogonal in language design. I consider e.g. Swift to be a safe and ergonomic/sugared language, that borrows, no pun intended, a lot of ideas from Rust

As long as you limit yourself to a subset of modern C++, it’s actually a decent language. Less guardrails than Rust, but more syntactic sugar (think overloading, default parameters, implicit this, implicit reference-taking, implicit conversions). You could argue those are anti-features, but even as someone who really likes Rust, I gotta admit C++ is occasionally more ergonomic.