Academic liars

If they say they want to make programming better and they use C, teach C, or are not trying to replace C, they are a liar.
If they say C is a good imperative programming language and anything better must be functional or object-oriented, they are a liar.
If they say a simplified or less undefined C will make programming better, they are a liar.
If they say C is too hard to replace, they are a liar.

Did everyone who learn BASIC continue to program in it for the decades after?

BASIC never had the industry traction that Javascript has right now. Lots of people learned C# and Java in university, and a lot of them are probably still only writing C# and Java one or two decades after.

Second, I know you think your average code monkey isn't very bright, but to say they'd think using a web browser masquerading as a text editor--is normal just because they learned javascript, is pretty absurd and cynical.

They don't think it's because of Javascript; they think it's because everybody has at least 16GB of RAM and a quad-core processor's worth of processing power to waste running those nowadays, so it's perfectly acceptable to run several browser rendering engines for each ``app'' you want to keep open.
And those who don't still think it's fine, because it's ``cross-platform'' and using GUI toolkits is too hard.