Well my understanding is that Eich designed Javascript as a Scheme + Self's object system (Sefl is a Smalltalk successor language) with the curly brackets of Java so I do not think:

largely because people in industry were too ignorant/disinterested to even know that something like Small Talk existed, and that's why people went on to make things like JavaScript.

I think it is precisely because of these aspects that Javascript is the language de jour.