some light reading for these dark days

You could read JavaScript: The First 20 Years:

How a sidekick scripting language for Java, created at Netscape in a ten-day hack, ships first as a de facto Web standard and eventually becomes the world’s most widely used programming language. This paper tells the story of the creation, design, evolution, and standardization of the JavaScript language over the period of 1995–2015. But the story is not only about the technical details of the language. It is also the story of how people and organizations competed and collaborated to shape the JavaScript language which dominates the Web of 2020.

The actual paper is like 190 pages though.

A brisker read is How I made a 3D game in only 2KB of JavaScript... personally I am more interested in faking the 3D effect than the compression stuff.