I had an easier time making sense of JavaScript once I really got into Emacs and started tinkering with Emacs Lisp to configure my editor. It turns out that JS has some qualities in common with Lisp despite not really being a Lisp dialect.
I’ll admit to firmly preferring the web as a hypertextual library over the web as an applications platform. Web and cloud apps feel like an attempt at pulling people away from personal computing on machines they own and control and back into a centralized paradigm characterized by mainframes, minicomputers, dumb terminals, and thin clients – mainly so that already-wealthy people who own the computers can further enrich themselves by making the rest of us pay rent.
People used to embed Java Applets and Flash just to get hover-over effects on navigation buttons.
A little JavaScript is nothing.
A hobby site likely has no cookies or login, no secrets to protect at all. Even if there was a problem with your scripts the security impact is likely nil.
The people who have made privacy into a hobby or a part of their identity have promulgated a lot of bad ideas.
SNAP benefits sites (described in the Alex Russel series) and personal home pages couldn’t be more different. There’s no need to take the design rigor demanded of critical infrastructure and apply it to your art project unless you want to. Nobody’s going to miss a meal because your site doesn’t render in Pale Moon so cut yourself some slack. Personal home pages always just barely worked and nobody died.