1) This decision was made pre-AI, where human familiarity mattered. Since the devs that would've used this were familiar with JS, that was what they were stuck with.

2) You're targeting to the wrong person. Blame the managers at Netscape for pushing Brendan Eich into creating JS, rather than letting him use Scheme as the scripting language. From there, it would've made sense to allow Scheme to be compiled into bytecode.

There's a lot of native code at Cloudflare. Just go look up the optimisations we did around crypto or compression in assembly. Or every time we use a compiled language like Go or Rust or C++.

I'd also say that when you look at JITed language like Lua and JavaScript the performance is pretty damn impressive. As with so many things it depends what you're doing.

isn't that their job? you can't deliver native code to web browsers.