> should we therefore never expand the capabilities of our tools?

Yes that's exactly what the luddites are arguing in favor of, rolling back progress, and dramatically stripping away capabilities. They don't consider any of it to be a net positive, they don't think of it as being progress.

It's not specific to JavaScript, it's far broader than that. It's an ethos.

In my observation they also typically want to go back to not having graphical user interfaces. They like a nice command line interface as a way of life. It seems silly to stop there though. The computer should be gotten rid of just the same to be philosophically consistent.