I like the DOM, basic CSS is fine. The twisted stuff some people do with CSS I'm not fine with but yeah I know. JS isn't going away, what irks me the most is the naivety around trying to push it to the backend. It doesn't belong in the backend when the frontend story is so messed up.
Backend JS is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but if you limit yourself to plain data and functions and write simple code, it can really work nicely for getting stuff done and iterating on an idea.
