When I was a kid, I started with BASIC, but I thought of "real programming" as being compiled languages, particularly C and assembler. Then in college I had a course where we wrote microcode for an imaginary CPU. FPGAs weren't really a thing then, but I would have liked to take a course with those. Now after years of Perl and SQL, I've come full circle back to (Visual) Basic.
But I would say assembly language is generally easier than javascript. In most cases (maybe not x86) there's a limited number of operations you can perform, and straightforward conventions on how to do them. Everything is documented (yes I know you can quibble with that, but relatively speaking) and there aren't ten different ways to do something of which 9 are wrong. You aren't dealing with all the layers of abstraction that tend to leak through either.
Assembly may be easier, but programming in assembly is a lot more tedious. A simple expression like "y=7*x+5" is at least four instructions, assuming you have a MUL instruction. And string manipulation is just as bad, if not worse, than in C.
But I would say assembly language is generally easier than javascript. In most cases (maybe not x86) there's a limited number of operations you can perform, and straightforward conventions on how to do them. Everything is documented (yes I know you can quibble with that, but relatively speaking) and there aren't ten different ways to do something of which 9 are wrong. You aren't dealing with all the layers of abstraction that tend to leak through either.