Every language since has had to pick a side, and "optional" always turns out to be the hardest choice.

JavaScript's ASI is what happens when a 10 day language has to live with a quick pragmatic decision for 30 years.

The problem discussed in the parent article was already solved correctly by 1965, 60 years ago, in the language CPL, the ancestor of BCPL, which is the ancestor of C.

It is sad that decades later, most programming languages remain worse from this point of view.

In CPL, a command or definition is terminated by a semicolon or by an end of line unless the end of line occurs at a point in the program where the context indicates that a command or definition cannot terminate at that point.

This means that only a minimum number of semicolons are needed, when you want to write multiple statements on a single line, and no special characters are needed to mark that a statement is written on multiple lines.

Before CPL, some languages terminated statements with semicolons, while others with new line characters. CPL was the first to allow either method of termination, and also where new line characters may terminate or not terminate a statement, depending on the context.

Thus CPL combined the advantage of ALGOL-like languages for writing statements on multiple lines with the advantage of FORTRAN-like languages for not requiring semicolons in most cases.