I'm going to guess that the format lends itself better to code obfuscation than JavaScript, for those that do not want their code to be open.
It's only through dynamic tools that we can even begin to understand minified JS today. Those are actually quite excellent: just try by starting the react or relay tools on facebook.
That ecosystem is hopefully not changing, so what remains is simply that the format is now binary. I agree that that makes me somewhat uncomfortable but realistically it doesn't really change anything.