The same was said about Java, although on a slightly different axis. It never really worked, and similarly, it doesn't work this way with JavaScript.
And your point of view is very, very narrow: only web applications. There are plenty of other applications of programming that have nothing to do with web development, barring semi-statically displaying some results. For those applications, JavaScript is a very bad fit.
> A massive, diverse, and vibrant community.
The same that produced tons of abandoned libraries, probably even more than lay abandoned in CPAN, which is much, much older and more mature. It's not a sign of a healthy community.
Also, your glorious React didn't exist three years ago. Why should I expect it to be still developed three years from now? It doesn't sound like a very transferrable skill.
> Getting Rid of `this'
> [...] purely-functional programming is becoming more popular in JavaScript.
Why not learn functional programming language for functional programming? It's not like JavaScript could do even decently. Just throwing bunch of functions to other functions is not quite functional programming yet; there's much more in this paradigm. And one has to go way, way out of his way to use this paradigm for real in JavaScript.
And so on. Overall, it's better to spend time learning several different languages of different levels and paradigms than to try to fit round peg in a square hole with JavaScript. JavaScript should be approached only after already learning three or four other general purpose languages (and twice as many DSLs, like make or SQL).