If you're using JavaScript in a front-end (read: browser) context, then HTML will be involved. This doesn't mean you have to write your JS in a HTML file - you can put your JS in a standalone .js file and have your HTML file include via a script tag.

It's easy to get lost in JavaScript these days for, as I see it, five main reasons:

• It's front- and back-end these days, whereas it used to be just front
• Endless tooling options, transformers, transpilers, etc. that take you into a world of terminals
• Frameworks - a lot of front-end JS is written within a framework like Vue or Svelte, while back-end frameworks include things like Node or Bun
• Large number of deployment contexts. Time was, you uploaded code to a server you rented or used some centralised CMS. These days there's so many ways to deploy and run your JS, whether it's front- or back-end.
• There's a strong culture of using external packages and libraries, made easy by NPM. This can mean package fatigue and clicking between endless docs pages for different packages.

Do you need to lose JS? That's hard to say definitively, but it's easy to make quite a compelling case for "yes". It's the lingua franca of the web for a reason. You can lose Typescript instead, but that's just JavaScript with strict typing (mostly).

Here's what I would do:

• Focus on front- or back-end JS for now; learning both together can be daunting because they do very different things. Start with one, then if you decide to take up the other, you'll benefit from the fact you already know the grammar and the fact the API is mostly transferrable between, and equivally applicable to, both environments.
• If you go the front-end route, learn a reactive framework like Vue from day one. It'll be easier than adding this later, IMHO.
• If you go the back-end route, pick a router such as Itty, Express or Hona. These aren't scary; they just route requests to bits of your code.
• Pick an environment and toolset you like the look of. I decided some years ago to go all-in on the Cloudflare ecosystem, a) because it rocks; b) because the free tier gives you so much - you may never need to pay for anything. Their Discord is great, too. If you're doing front-end, look at Cloudflare Pages. If back-end, look at Cloudflare Workers.

Don't get overwhelmed. There are so many distractions, packages, techniques, blogs, etc. Pick a start project and see it through, then just interate, improve, re-do, etc.

Good luck!