All of these complexities have either existed or evolved in the browser completely independent of Node. And while I have plenty of criticism for Node particularly around its dependency resolution, it didn’t introduce new complexity in this case (other than what it inflicted on itself to allow ESM/CJS to coexist, which doesn’t extend to browsers at all.)

As far as write once/run anywhere, Deno has been pretty good at showing this is still limiting but could be much less painful if the server runtime shared more applicable APIs instead of ad hoc doing idiosyncratic stuff.

I’ll definitely agree that JS is a bit lisp like, but not due to runtimes. It’s been a build target with build time semantics for a long while. Unfortunately it’s unlike lisp in that those semantics are part of arbitrary tooling which don’t always agree but have been forced to coexist, rather than semantics of the language itself.