@michael_martinez i don't work in the SEO space, but i chanced upon your post while looking for discussion around google's decision
people aren't "freaking out", they are criticizing google's decision on several accounts
JS in web pages is often times non-compliant with accesibility tools: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/Accessibility/CSS_and_JavaScript - if the web should be accessible, that means that *all of us* should be able to navigate the web pages
the change will also open up security vulnerabilities: https://www.zdnet.com/article/which-are-the-most-insecure-programming-languages/