I've found that, very broadly, people from a backend or traditional compsci background are most likely to hate js; and people who are from a web background less likely to hate it.
The compsci people tend to bemoan the lack of strict typing; or the general quirkyness of JS; or various other complaints that largely boil down to the lack of a compiler; or the lack of a standard lib. Or to put it another way - JS doesn't comply with the way they were trained to write "good code" at university. It feels fundamentally wrong to them.
I think people from the web side are more willing to accept js on its own terms. After all if you want to write a script that runs in a browser, js is literally the only choice. So you can get busy crying or you can get busy coding ;) (yes WASM will eventually change that, but not for a while yet)
In reality, in 2017 you don't have to write JS if you don't want to. For a start, if you don't want to be a frontend dev don't get a job as a frontend dev..! But even if you have to produce client-side code, there are languages that transpile to JS; or addons like Flow and Typescript that can add strong types to JavaScript.