So need to install node and npm and then typescript. Go is 1 binary to download and throw in a dir.
I don't find js hard to learn (and I have been programming in it since it came out (I was in the CMS business since the early 90s), I just find it ugly and annoying to work with. But yeah, I guess the ecosystem definitely doesn't help as it's hard to see the proliferation of terrible software/frameworks and habits totally separate from the language; apparently there is something in it that attracts these terrible practices.
> Neither of these require any bullshit with tooling or anything hard.
JS requires any text editor and a browser.
TS requires Node and npm i -D typescript.
> You can learn enough Go in a few hours to be productive (like C)
You want to say that C and Go are easier to learn that JS? JS is literally primitive types, objects and functions at its core.