Coming from the Objective-C and Swift world I get you. Coming into the language with no prior experience with it leaves a sour taste in your mouth. It didnt take me too long to figure out I would hate it with a passion. The languages is deceptive. DOM is deceptive and unforgiving for those that have never worked with. It sucks. Why do I have to install Typescript just so I can use Javascript?
Javascript has no classes (while at the same time, trying to pretend that it does). To your point about array, Javascript arrays aren't really arrays - that is, it's not a list of items. JS defines these as 'associate arrays', meaning that they can be whatever they dev wants it to be. You can also divide arrays by each other and there will be no compiler error or it might not even crash. You will still get an answer to what is in the 'array' but it won't be right. The program might crash 1,000 lines later but there is no way to trace the problem. How do you even debug a large application? I couldn't even find a method to see if an array contained a specific item, or to get the number of items in it or to test if it was empty. The " == " operator isn't what you think it is.
Where's the basic data structures? Classes? Not on your life. Inheritance? (of a different kind). Reading from and writing to files is awful. Especially when reading files other that contain other things such as data streams(i.e. pdfs, general binary data, etc).
They need to completely start over, get all the browsers to agree on a standard and force people to stop supporting older versions and upgrade to the new standard. Establish a consortium. Until then, I'm not trying again. I'll go back to Swift.