Im in the same boat. In theory JavaScript holds more potential to make finely crafted visuals. But you're right, the ecosystem is so mature I still find other ecosystems lacking.

But if anything would change my opinion this has the right set of values

I'm not really a JavaScript person either, but that hasn't been the worst problem with observable. Tools like vega-lite and importable tools from other notebooks really reduces the amount of code I need to write. Like, I'm not writing d3 code for hours for a simple choropleth. What makes it easier is that I can query objects using SQL rather than lengthy JavaScript code.