JS is easy, JS ecosystem is not.

There are plenty of sharp edges in JavaScript to cut yourself on. For that reason I'd argue it isn't easy.

Compare it to something like C# where you could start pushing out code on day one. It might not be pretty or the most efficient code but there won't be any surprises, it will do what you expect.

I would say JS is simple, but it’s not easy. :)

I love the language - it is earning me a comfortable income and I am very productive in it, but it requires experience and iron code discipline not to let it bite you!

No, otherwise I would have written it that way. ;)

Well, then I strongly disagree. Modern JS is very easy to write, but extremely complex because of all the leftover cruft. For example, a beginner can declare a varible with let, const, var or (what could be easier) nothing at all. The resulting scoping rules, however, are anything but simple.

I don't think it's complex at all. The scoping rules are very simple. Block scoping just added another piece.

The difficulty is that there are many simple things like this to learn and to combine in a safe and maintainable manner for anything other than trivial programs. Out of the box, the language does nothing to discourage bad coding practices (some might say it even encourages them). It's the flip-side of being such an accessible language.

It is possible write JS in a way that avoids a lot of the complexity, but it requires experience and discipline and some tooling, just to be sure. The code will look simple but it is not an easy thing to do.

Programming is mostly the practice of reading code rather than writing, and this is where the complexity is felt.

Good point. But I don't think a complete beginner would use complex JS frameworks.