It's so strange to me that JS goes so far to avoid errors, mashing random stuff into strings or NaNs, misspelled variables just become undefined, etc. Then when your off-the rails program reaches `undefined()` it's "woah woah woah, that's clearly nonsense, stop program execution right this instant". I feel like I could respect it a little more if they committed to "a webpage should never crash under any circumstances" and there were just no exceptions in the language whatsoever.

It has nothing to do with the wish to not crash page.

Javascript was a prototype that was supposed to be refined and cleaned. Then management said "we will ship it now" and it was shipped as it was.

At the time, they thought it will be used for small things, minor snippets on web page. Webapps as we have them were not a thing yet.