I think there's another way to look at this. Right now the DOM is exposed to the browser in a way that makes Javascript the most natural way to manipulate browser elements.

There is a movement towards a more elegant way of expressing UI, where functional languages and imperative languages with functional features can both be used, but these currently require often large and complicated frameworks or even comete language runtimes.

Ultimately these also require some kind of Javascript bridge which leads us back to it being central to web programming. You either use Javascript or you go to great lengths to hide it.

The solution, which is slowly emerging in a de-facto manner, is to expose to any chosen language whether implemented in Javascript, wasm, or some new JIT compiled bytecode with dynamic features, a transactional, IPC-based API for rendering, diffing, and merging web content.

JQuery inspired the selector APIs (querySelector*) which in turn improved the efficiency of, then mostly obviated, JQuery itself.

I imagine the same thing could happen with React-like frameworks and things like Elm.