I find that stretching my head around a new and different paradigm is it's own reward. Everyone's different and has different goals.
If your goal is to implement dynamic web content as productively as possible, no one will fault you for sticking with what you already know and are comfortable with. But it's not valid to conclude that everything else is terrible if it doesn't improve the type of things that you do.
Personally, I've lost count of the number of times I'd wished a blocking API call was instead non-blocking. Do a survey of how many desktop Windows applications are able to exit gracefully while a File->Open dialog box is still open.
Stretching my head around functional programming was rewarding. Stretching my head around lisp was rewarding. Stretching my heard around continuation[1] passing style was rewarding.
Stretching my head around everything-is-async was not rewarding. Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's good.
I agree that FP, Lisp, and CPS are rewarding. I find async IO very appealing because so very often I've had to implement imperfect workarounds when it wasn't available.
But I still feel really conflicted about Javascript.
If your goal is to implement dynamic web content as productively as possible, no one will fault you for sticking with what you already know and are comfortable with. But it's not valid to conclude that everything else is terrible if it doesn't improve the type of things that you do.
Personally, I've lost count of the number of times I'd wished a blocking API call was instead non-blocking. Do a survey of how many desktop Windows applications are able to exit gracefully while a File->Open dialog box is still open.