Recently, JavaScript has adopted lot of language feature from C#, Ruby etc., that make it really useful for most common tasks. And the community moves really really fast, hence adoption of new language syntax is quite fast.
JavaScript has some killer platforms / apps, that are being used in production by high-traffic companies.
You can do cross-platform Desktop app in Electron (Slack, VSCode, Atom etc. are written with this).
Front-end build tools are written in Node JS, and they do lot of heavy lifting as well. Babel is a transpiler, Webpack is a bundler.
These days, native mobile apps (not hybrid apps) in JS are also gaining traction, via React Native.
From open source communities to big behemoths are behind this.
I would like to hear what about JS turned you off so much?