I completely disagree with the premise that a high-level language should be able to do substantially more work with the same amount of code as C. That is not the point of a high-level language, not even close. The point of a high-level language is simply to abstract away some of the more difficult problems inherent to programming closer to the metal.

And as far as languages go, JavaScript is not nearly so far removed from raw machine code as most interpreted languages.

100MB of JavaScript code is not “astoundingly huge” at all , considering the bulk of that is tooling. Compared to the tooling for many other commonly used C/C++ development environments, 100MB is pretty modest.