I agree with their criticism, the language is a mess syntactically, and has many limits (pointers, operator overloading and so on). It may be cross platform, but in most use cases in my experience, actual binaries are needed. It's possible to learn programming by doing tasks in books, and it's a start, but getting good at something requires independent projects and that means code that you can compile easily a lot of times. However, javascript is even less useful for such independent projects. It's just one step away from asking people to learn PHP (which would be a total catastrophe).
Pascal/Delphi starts out with bare limits (no mumbo jumbo syntax) and includes most, if not all, features of C++ at similar performance. That's what I would recommend instead.