Wha? That's a take.

Here's mine: ES6 classes are wildly smart. They provide the benefits of prototypical inheritance--you can just reach into the thing and do what you want to do!--while making it way easier for many developers to read and parse in short order, while reducing the difficulty spike in moving to JavaScript (or, today, TypeScript).

"Pandering". Right.

I can write old-style object prototypes. It makes my eyes bleed and makes me make more mistakes. So I'm just not gonna do that anymore.

It depends somewhat on when you tried to learn prototypes in JS. The time before Firefox implementation detail `__proto__` leaked into general web platform usage had some rough spots, as the big obvious example to mind. It still took almost too long after that before `Object.getPrototypeOf()` and `Object.setPrototypeOf()` were standardized. Admittedly "the prototype of this instance" shouldn't always be accessed and/or manipulated directly in "proper" prototype-oriented code, but there are a lot of practical cases that show up where it ends up being useful.