Honestly, all this “emulated with prototypes” meme is misleading. Prototypes are an implementation of what they’ve called “binding” before (some may recognize “early” and “late” in this context). That’s how classes work and what classes are. The fact that some gears got exposed to a user [to stick their fingers into] doesn’t change much.

So no, javascript didn’t really “add classes”. It just had a very annoying lower-level syntax for them from the beginning and fixed it after a while. It wouldn’t survive the pressure if it had no classes at all cause this idea is fundamental to programming and to how we think: you-do.

One may pretend to not have classes through closures, but technically that’s just classes again, cause you have a bunch of functions with a shared upvalue block. You just hold it the other way round lexically, by a method instead of a context.

I believe this common idea of alienating classes stems from the general OOP stigma since the times of “design patterns”.