Comment by lixquid

I'd wager a lot of this popularity is correlation, not causation. A lot of its popularity stems from being the dominant browser scripting language. This causes it to be popular with back-end frameworks for code re-use and shared developer skill. This causes it to be popular with, say, database engines that are used by the back-end, and so on and so forth.

WebAssembly is the first steps to truly breaking that chokehold, and truly seeing how popular JavaScript the language really is.