> Javascript is not a beginner language anymore.
Why not? You can still write vanilla JS the same way you could decades ago without much (any?) change.
> It has a lot of edge cases and traps that defeat the average person.
It's always had that. In fact, I think the reason it feels less like a beginner language is that the solutions we've created to handle the edge-cases and traps have been solved for professionals. It's more that the way we teach it has changed. It's now a "professional" tool, so most content out there is aimed at people endeavoring to become professionals, needing to deal with all the complex realities of professional-grade problems. But you can still teach it in the same beginner-friendly way you could in the early 2000's.
I've seen this teaching my son (using JavaScript). My instinct is to direct him to use all of the techniques I use because it's the "right" way. But a beginner doesn't really care about the problems that the "right" way solves. They don't even know about them yet. So it's overkill. Forget Typescript, webpack, eslint, Angular, node, etc., let's just write everything in one HTML file (not even using to include a separate .js file yet) and focus on the thing he's interested in making. We'll get to all that other stuff eventually, and then he'll actually have enough foundation and context to understand and appreciate (not to say all the complexity we've built is perfect).