IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL.
IME many computer programmers learned Lisp in college and for some reason hated it–I think in part due to the syntax and in part because they had a hard time with recursion and other "mind-bending" concepts. They often still harbor an irrational precedent to this day.
Me, on the other hand, I loved Lisp as soon as I learned it. (Perhaps I was primed by having learned APL in high school.) I changed my major from Astrophysics to Computer Science because I felt that SICP was even cooler than black holes and neutron stars.
IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL.
JS is a first language for a lot of people - because their goal was to make a website do something. Scheme would not have been any different.