What makes webapps bloated is the require-at-the-top pattern. Type system makes no difference here. What most devs don't realize is that if their precious app written in holy C plus plus or Java got compiled into a standalone binary that could run on any device inside a browser, it would be a 150 MB mess that wouldn't even boot. All these nice frameworks, libs and utils would need to be downloaded before the app can start. We'll see this soon with wasm, btw.
Why do you care so much about reducing gun ownership in the US, when the US gov ships thousands of containers with weapons to KSA that uses them in Yemen?
50 years from now: AG Joe Bare said in a speech last month that FBI couldn't access recordings of the felons thoughts because the opted out from brain chip implant; he further said that the practice of letting some individuals hiding their thoughts from authorities has a high cost of mounting number of victims, some of whom are kids. He added that the 1st amendment gives far too much freedom and needs to be rethought in the changed society.
Being a small language would be irrelevant to JS. The web could benefit from a sound type system built into browsers (aka typescript in the strict mode), but it's not like anybody complains about python lacking the type system, right? What web really needs is a way to write highly modular apps and let the browser download only relevant modules, with caching, prefetching and so on. None of the attempts have worked so far. If you look an any app today, it looks like the main module that has static deps on other modules that deoent on other modules and so on. When everything is linked together, we get this 50MB binary. Not a big deal for native apps or services, but it's a big deal for web apps that need to download all this mess and maybe actually use 20%. There is no way today to conveniently write a web app that would pull only necessary modules at runtime. It's not just that the language is missing some keywords, it's about the entire web world is designed around static linking: we'd need to redo existing non modules, existing frameworks, upgrade to http2 for batching multiple requests to download a bunch of small modules and so on. That's a lot of work that needs a lot of expensive devs and the returns of that work are non existent: there's no profit to be made there. That's why it'll stay this way: bloated web apps with thousands of unused deps.