The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it’s barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.
Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It’s self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.
Of course, you’ll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.
TypeScript solves most of your type issues. Zod gives you runtime enforcement of those types if you want, if you can stomach installing a library. But it’s true it’s not actually a statically typed language with built-in runtime enforcement of types. I hope in the next 5-10 years we see browsers that are able to run TypeScript with both runtime enforcement and performance benefits from using actual static typing. But IMO TypeScript is good enough solving most of the type problems with JavaScript.
You’re welcome to use as many or as few libraries as you want. There are tons of JavaScript libraries, and some of those libraries have way too many dependencies. But if you cut through the noise, there are actually a lot of high-quality libraries that don’t have an absurd number of dependencies and bring a lot of value.
JavaScript is by no means perfect, but I think it’s become trendy to hate on it. Every language has its issues. JavaScript has done an amazing job outgrowing many of its problems. Growth has brought new problems, but I’ve been writing JS/TypeScript for 10 years, and would not like to go back to JS 10 years ago. It kind of sucked compared to today.