Your ideas about excellence in software engineering are using outmoded concepts about the composition of high-quality software. Your arbitrary metric of 20K LOC is telling, because the trend is toward building large applications composed of small, focused services that can be replicated to scale. Javascript is not by any means a “good” or “elegant” language, but you can still use it to easily build “good” and “elegant” small to medium sized applications, especially using well designed frameworks and good testing practices.