Javascript and front end code worries me

For whatever reason, whenever I look at front end code, I am agitated. Front end code to me is anything that is used to construct presentation to the user. This includes client side and server side technologies. For example, PHP is server side compiled but it presents content too.

A lot of front end work enables a lot of flexibility. Your page redering can be a single function, or not even a function. View pages can also be controllers as well depending on request parameters. View pages can return HTML, XML, JSON, etc depending on input.

Then I read Modern JavaScript, and I realized I am not alone in my worries.

As I am becoming more and more fond of Javascript, again I am worried. I see code all over the place. Functions that are a hundred lines long, no room for extension, scripts scattered across page templates, fragments and includes that render together as one. Where is the traceability and testing? In addition, I usually am not the original author when looking at bugs. I don't have the authors context and reasoning. I have to resort to the browser for debugging to understand how elements are combined and how they are dependent. Not the IDE, the browser.

• When I see server side dynamically created Javascript, I am worried. 
• When I see large DOM elements being constructed in Javascript and added to the page, I am worried.  
• When I see more then one $(document).ready() in the primary rendering page, I am worried. 
•  When I see a lot of global variables defined across includes, fragments and templates, I am worried.
• When I talk to developers about bad Javascript and they tell me I should rewrite it if I don't understand it, I am worried. 

Hopefully things will get better, maybe they don't have to. Maybe developers need to grow up. A lot of code looks like "college code", you know, when you first are learning to program and hacked everything together? When you didn't debug, used a notepad editor and used logging statements for tests?