But that's kind of my point, Marc.

What I personally consider to be "real" languages, as opposed to "toy" languages, actively prevent developers from pitfalls and doing anything too "weird", and people a LOT smarter than me have been trying unsuccessfully to get TypeScript to compile to machine code for years.

JavaScript was originally intended as a client-side scripting language, and node was a proof-of-concept that "escaped from the lab".

When I design and lead teams to build mission-critical applications that must scale, be secure, be up all the time, etc, i.e. where the stakes are lots of money, regulatory compliance, etc, I'm not looking for "decent" performance or dependency Jenga. And in my 30 years of experience of doing this, developers will absolutely find and try every bizarre work-around just to get something to work unless they are prevented from doing so, preferably by the compiler.