The fact that we have been driven to madness by the horrible design of the web does not

I wouldn't characterize it as such. The reality is, we are pretty effin lucky the Web turned out the way it did. It does it what it does very well. I mean we have an open platform that every major tech company is on-board with, that isn't controlled, wholly, by any single one of them, a platform that works on almost every capable device out there. Those same companies cannot agree on anything else and are openly hostile to each other in every other space, except this one. It could have been worse. And future versions of JavaScript are looking pretty good too!

I'd prefer that HTML/CSS was better designed for building web-applications (right now it's a Frankenstein that doesn't know whether it wants to be a UI toolkit or markup for text). I'd prefer a language like Dart or Python to power web-pages, instead of JavaScript. But oh well.

The ultimate goal is to deliver functionality to users. Users don't give a damn what the platform is.

And that's part of the reason why JavaScript sticks around. Users don't care, and you can get far with JavaScript.