I was somewhat involved during the design of classes for JavaScript and I can tell you - it was really touch and go there whether classes were going to be added, and if so, how they would be added. Most people involved wanted classes, but nobody could really agree what they should be. Some people wanted classes to be entirely different and an alternative to prototypes. The failed ES4 that never came to fruition was pursuing that approach. Ultimately the simple sugar approach won the day in the Maximally Minimal class proposal.
At the time, there were a lot of ad hoc and incompatible libraries that simulated classes. Additionally, there are aspects of the class pattern that were extremely error prone to do by hand - things like inheritance and doing super calls especially which were fixed with the new class syntax. Technically, the way super works is not possible to do with the old prototype style. It also dovetailed well into Microsoft's desire to create TypeScript and wanting to create something familiar to C# devs. While functional programming was definitely a big influence at the time, it didn't have the same hold that it has now. It's interesting to consider whether or not it was a good choice since many people are moving away from really using prototypes at all and trying to stick to pure functional style now, but the landscape was very different at the time.
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I was somewhat involved during the design of classes for JavaScript and I can tell you - it was really touch and go there whether classes were going to be added, and if so, how they would be added. Most people involved wanted classes, but nobody could really agree what they should be. Some people wanted classes to be entirely different and an alternative to prototypes. The failed ES4 that never came to fruition was pursuing that approach. Ultimately the simple sugar approach won the day in the Maximally Minimal class proposal.
At the time, there were a lot of ad hoc and incompatible libraries that simulated classes. Additionally, there are aspects of the class pattern that were extremely error prone to do by hand - things like inheritance and doing super calls especially which were fixed with the new class syntax. Technically, the way super works is not possible to do with the old prototype style. It also dovetailed well into Microsoft's desire to create TypeScript and wanting to create something familiar to C# devs. While functional programming was definitely a big influence at the time, it didn't have the same hold that it has now. It's interesting to consider whether or not it was a good choice since many people are moving away from really using prototypes at all and trying to stick to pure functional style now, but the landscape was very different at the time.