Coffeescript was great though, because at the time Javascript was growing fast but the language was developing slowly or not at all. There was also Atscript for a little while which added annotations because Typescript didn't want to add them; they eventually budged and Atscript was dead. Then there was a fork of Node because Node at the time was still tightly controlled by Joyent, whereas its fork (io.js or js.io or something) was an open governance model. It was eventually merged back into node.

TL;DR sometimes you need to make an alternative to get the original to move.