Yeah I agree on a lot of the points you mentioned. Block scoping would have been better in my view also. But there are tools, like in other languages, to ease that pain. I never forget a semicolon due to using js2-mode which makes missing semicolons stand out. JSLint and other tools of the sort help find bad code too. And the in browser tools like the Chrome dev tools with a debugger,tracing,console really make it much easier.

Javascript without the tools would be a real pain.