Great read, but it seems like the article overlooks a few other pretty significant reasons for Javascript's current dominance: (a) jQuery and (b) Apple keeping Flash out of iOS made from the start.
Say what you will about the relative inelegance of jQuery, at the time of its release it certainly made JS--particularly DOM manipulation and AJAX--very accessible and cross-browser compliant. It definitely made articles like this seem quaint. [1][2]
At about the time of jQuery's release, Flash development was a viable alternative for smaller sites. I was doing bits and pieces of freelance around 2007 and after the iPhone came out, even my least tech-saavy clients stopped talking about Flash.
Pretty sure that these two bits made it so that every front end dev/ designer in the world was at least passably decent at Javascript by the time Node arrived.
As for jQuery - nobody disputes that it had HUGE impact on the web - document.querySelector(All) itself is the living proof to that claim. It's just... it was around for waaay to long.
Building tools and extending what is currently made available to developers by the platform - all this is in our very natures as developers. We did that even in the early days, when low-level primitives were mostly missing to support us in that work.
Jake Archibald explains this in a comment on Nat Duca's post over at G+[1] - give developers some primitives; see what they do with them - then distill it and create high-performance features out of what now you already know there is a market for. TC39 works on this basic principle (everybody whines about types in JavaScript - TypeScript might be the JavaScript's jQuery here, paving the way for some distilled type system in JS (or SoundScript. or anything else that's out there).
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As for Apple - I am siding with Peter-Paul Koch on this[2] - Apple had some quite a few good deeds in favor of the web, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it just seems to be protecting its walled garden that is native apps & the related ecosystem - certainly not giving a whole lot about making the web a better place (or devs, for that matter). The Pointer Events fiasco is a perfect reminder to all this.
For any good Apple has did to the web, the surely made equal bad so the scales are (IMHO, at most) 50-50 here.
Say what you will about the relative inelegance of jQuery, at the time of its release it certainly made JS--particularly DOM manipulation and AJAX--very accessible and cross-browser compliant. It definitely made articles like this seem quaint. [1][2]
At about the time of jQuery's release, Flash development was a viable alternative for smaller sites. I was doing bits and pieces of freelance around 2007 and after the iPhone came out, even my least tech-saavy clients stopped talking about Flash.
Pretty sure that these two bits made it so that every front end dev/ designer in the world was at least passably decent at Javascript by the time Node arrived.
[1] http://boxesandarrows.com/htmls-time-is-over-lets-move-on/ [2] Also, Mootools and Prototype and YUI etc, but jQuery is the one that became ubiquitous