>Transpilation is the number one reason I've seen that makes maintenance of older projects hard. The fact that JS didn't standardize on a module syntax until far too late means that we're forced into a transpilation cycle to build bigger projects. I can call that a mistake without denying it's reality.

You answered your own objection. The language is deficient so alternatives are sought (lack of standard modules is one problem). Nobody likes transpilation and nobody would do it if JavaScript was conducive to building and maintaining large applications.

>If you want to build a web application, at some point, until we have true web assembly, you will have to use javascript

No. You can build it in TypeScript or Dart or any number of more sane language and transpile to JavaScript. Which is what people are doing.