What's the worst part about the JS ecosystem?

The fact that you need a complex build process (Webpack, Babel) to be able to utilize newer features/versions of the language ... Webpack and Babel are products of a genius, but what would be absolutely gold is if we wouldn't need them anymore.

(what other language requires you to learn the intricacies of a complex build tool like Webpack in order to use modern versions of the language? any other language you can mention - Python, Ruby, PHP, you just install the latest compiler/runtime and there you go)

JavaScript.

The community has done an heroic job of building useful things on top of it, defying the "house built on sand" fate, but I still wish the language itself had not been rushed in ten days in the early days at Netscape.

Ignorance/lack of knowledge.

Lots of people know jQuery, React, Vue, etc., but they don't know JavaScript itself. If you take away their library, they would be lost. They don't understand how React works and why it's useful. They don't know how and when to use different strategies and methods, because they lack the understanding of how those things work under the covers.

The constant fighting over everything and anything. Just let everyone use what they love and focus on building cool stuff.

Dependencies, and more specifically: Invisible dependencies.

For any medium sized project, node_modules has everything you needed, everything those packages needed and so on.

In the end, we’re depending on code we didn’t even know we’re using. What’s worse, these 3rd party dependencies can conflict with your own and can be a real horror show to upgrade and keep up to date.

There are lot´s of complains about the use of "this", which give people some headaches. For me, the worst thing about "this" is the use in classes. As any class variable and any class function is bound to "this", code inside a class is peppered with hundreds of "this".

On the other hand, function definitions inside a class do not need the "function" identifier. Writing longer class definitions you often get los to know, what precise class you are working on. I just started to add the class-name as a comment:

class test{
    myVar
    /*test*/myMethod(){ this.myVar = "Hello world" }
}

It would be far more handy to have any class method clearly be part of the class like

class test{
   let myVar
   test.myMethod(){ myVar = "Hello world" }
}

This yould also allow to shift some code into a class without the need to rewrite anything.

People who complain about the JS ecosystem...
Sure there are some flaws; but I'd love to hear what 'ecosystem' doesn't have any.

JavaScript needs an official compiler, projects like webpack, typescript, rollup, babel should come together and create under ECMA an official compiler, goal should be compile to targets like old browsers/node versions and directly to wasm. The ultimate goal should be no difference between browser and Node + rebranding of JS call it "Node" maybe?

Everything from start to end. The tooling is a nightmare for those of us that wasn't into front-end development when Angular, React, etc, came to light. Nowadays, every single goddamn tutorial takes for granted that you already know how NPM works, it just goes to 'hey, install this, put this code there, bam, your todo app is done!' without actually properly explaining whats going on. It took me 6 months to understand how importing JS packages works, and why I don't need any kind of autoloader of whatever, like pretty much every PHP framework does.

Promise, async and await are also another nightmare that is so bad explained that only today I finallly got a small grasp on how they work (thanks to this article dev.to/zackdotcomputer/i-promise-y...), but I'm still confused about their usage and everywhere I look, things got more complex instead of breaking down each concept first before you start doing any actual code.

There are still lots of stuff that works by black magic hidden under a stone set aside a tree in the middle of the nordic forest on Kepler-10c. It just works, but how?

And please don't get me started on node_modules. That is ridiculous, an atrocity, and I wish that whoever came up with this got fired and was never allowed to touch, get close, stand nearby or even talk about any computer, ever again.

Hi there, pigoz!

... I think it's the usual stuff that affects big, large, and in this case immense communities: latent toxicity from some members, who don't lose time to spew vitriolic remarks and uncostructive comments towards this or that library/framework/specification/tool. We really, really don't need that 😫

As the language per se, it's mainly fine. I wish we had, you know, types but it seems that TC39 is fine with the current situation of transpiling everything. Which is strange, since they gave us so many things to let us use module directly. In practice, we still create big bundles...