People "learning" by copying, coupled with large popularity, are what gave JavaScript, PHP and Perl such bad reputations. There are tutorials for most of the things newcomers might want to do in JavaScript. As such, I wouldn't place much value in people copying my work when deciding if minification is necessary.
I assume we're talking about individual per-site code here, since they can always download non-minified versions of commonly served frameworks easily somewhere else.
In fairness, I learned the same way, then learned to do it right. Back when AOL started providing Web access, one of the first things I noticed was the "view source" command. I learned how to make Web pages just by looking at existing ones and mauling them until they broke to see how the code worked. Later I got actual books and learned to do it properly.
Popularity is not the only success-factor to consider regarding programming languages. I'd contend that the ubiquity of javascript makes certain that it will retain (and grow) popularity for quite some time even without the easy "view source" option.
We're simply moving from one era into another; nothing wrong with progress!
I assume we're talking about individual per-site code here, since they can always download non-minified versions of commonly served frameworks easily somewhere else.