JavaScript did not die, I was wrong

I think there's a couple reasons.

1. It's been the dominant web language forever at this point. If you wanted to build a web app, or add any sort of interactivity to a webpage, then you were using Javascript. There's some more modern options, but it's hard to go against the inertia that JS has. There's a huge range of libs out there for it, and that saves a lot of dev time over having to roll your own solution. This is especially the case considering a lot of work is just CRUD apps, you're not really doing anything groundbreaking or requiring fine grained control. I

2. Getting started is super easy and tooling for beginners is quite robust. You can install a functioning web app with a single command that takes care of all your deps and sets up a sane build process.

To give a counterpoint, I'm a huge fan of Clojure and Clojurescript. A problem that I see echoed over and over again is how difficult it is to get a basic app up and running for beginners. This hampers growth, and scares away people that might want to use the language. I'll admit that, for a beginner, JS is a much easier route to get started with.

3. JS has also gotten significantly better to work with over the years. Things like React have changed how we build apps, and are a huge improvement over the JQuery days. Typescript has also made writing JS much nicer and brings with it a lot of the advantages that typed languages have.

4. JS is everywhere at this point. I can basically use a the same code base to write a web app, mobile app, server api, or a native desktop app. The ease of being able to port your code across projects, and being able to think in the same language terms, is a big win in a lot of cases.

That's my take on it at least. Javascript is certainly not without its warts, but it does have a lot of positives going for it.