A while back, I made a half-observation, half-joke on LinkedIn. The great JavaScript toolchain rewrite barged in. Older tools became uncool, their sluggish performance blamed for slowing code. It's hard to track the cool kids, but their promise is speed. It's a strange time: JavaScript is ubiquitous yet losing ground in its own backyard. Tools are faster, setup easier, abstractions thicker. We write, configure and wait less. We bundle, ship and hotfix more. What happens between code and product becomes easier to ignore. Benchmarks beam green. So why ruin the party?

For a language written in ten days, JavaScript achieved the unthinkable. It escaped the browser and swallowed everything. Many would write servers and tools in JavaScript. It made it onto phones, consoles, microcontrollers, your fridge. If it understands bits, it can run JavaScript. Despite popularity, it never had it easy. Attempts to replace it began early: Microsoft's VBScript and JScript, Macromedia/Adobe's ActionScript, Google's Dart, CoffeeScript. When not replacing, we patched: jQuery, Lodash, Moment.js. JavaScript wasn't still. ECMAScript releases brought features. TC39 kept proposals coming. Then TypeScript succeeded by accepting JavaScript wasn't going anywhere.

One language to rule them all is a blessing and a curse. We spent decades on the curse, forgot the blessing. As JavaScript spread, it ate its own dog food. Node.js enabled tools in the same language. If something broke, developers could check code, understand bugs, maybe fix, submit a pull request. At least they could blame the...