I'm not so sure about that. While there are a lot of complicated situations for JS dev, there's also a lot of similar patterns. I'm not saying we need to ignore the various complexities involved in JS dev, but we should make the general patterns easier to solve. Yes, of course transpilation can have all these different edge cases. But we should be able to have some preset modes that can do 90% of the work automatically. Like it baffles the mind that I still need to tell webpack that JSX files should be loaded by babel.

And anyways, there's the entire backend JS ecosystem, which is extremely behind Rails in developer ergonomics. I can spin up a REST API in Rails in half the time it takes to connect Node to a database.