You are forgetting that even Eich didn't want to do JS; he wanted to embed Scheme but was overruled by suits at Netscape who wanted to ride the Java hype. That's why the semicolons and curly braces. It really is indefensible on technical grounds.
I think they also told him to make it forgiving, like html, so that beginners could use it. Thus the implicit conversion rules, optional semicolons, being able to leave new off a function constructor, not having to use var, and so forth.
It's too bad nobody pumped the brakes after it was a little successful, and said "Okay guys, let's stop dicking around and do this right now, before we have to deal with it for the next 30 years". Alas...
These laundry lists of js warts get dragged out continually, so I really have to ask: How are you people actually developing in javascript and haven't yet discovered linters?
Linters have been around for over a decade and solve all of these issues (as they do in other languages as well). They're also easily integrated in every text editor and build system I've ever seen.
And why shouldn't the interpreter support these rules? Because a linter can do this almost as easily, and not break backward compatibility.
