I write PHP for a living and every time I look at the JS world, I feel like they're exactly where PHP was 15 years ago, except with 20 times the amount of incomprehensible tooling.
I’ve worked with PHP and JS extensively and while I could almost agree from some narrow perspectives, I think JS is nowhere near where PHP was 15 years ago in any sense.
I was writing PHP 15 years ago. It wasn’t a great dev experience and the tooling was awful. JavaScript today has stellar tooling in comparison, and arguably less warts in its standard library than PHP still has today.
I really disliked JavaScript until I read some books that helped me understand what it’s doing under the hood. These days I just don’t have issues with it. Yeah, the ecosystem thrashes a lot and the tooling experience can be bad in regards to that, but otherwise it’s impressive lately. Even without TypeScript, intellisense on regular JS enables extremely streamlined navigation of references and implementations, refactoring, project navigation, tooling integration, etc. Not to mention modern profiling and debugging tools for JS are incredibly easy to use and benefit from.
PHP wasn’t at this stage even 10 years ago. The debugging story was still xdebug and tooling was improving but not great. Composer was painfully slow and buggy - nowhere near as nice as yarn and npm are now.
Yeah JS has problems, but I don’t believe it’s nearly as bad as old PHP.
This may be a little off topic but your comment piqued my interest: I am currently learning JavaScript and I was wondering if you would like to recommend any of the books you read.