Not really. A lot of the work is done in the IDE. Yeah you can respond to events but that is something that is pretty much in every language not just javascript. When I was Unity programming I was using C#. Maybe he says its a lot like javascript because Unity gives you the option to code in either C# or javascript? Unity is easy to pick up. The most time consuming part is learning the IDE.
As a side note you may find these courses helpful. I used them both when I was learning Unity. They may be a bit outdated now i'm not sure. The only problem for you would be that they use C#. To the best of my knowledge C# seemed to be the more prominent language in Unity so it may be worth looking into it. These courses also have very basic introduction to C#. The courses are around $20 each if you wait for them to go on sale. You most likely wouldn't need both. https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/learn/v4/overview https://www.udemy.com/make-mobile-games-like-a-pro-using-unity-game-engine/learn/v4/overview
Unity is an integrated development environment or game engine, not a programming language. You can use JavaScript or C# or other languages to program functions and objects. It sets up a canvas, much like Photoshop, that provides you the ability to modify the appearance of a scene. You combine a bunch of different objects to make an elegant looking template and then program functions. Much like creating a button, then using JavaScript to create an event handler that triggers calculations upon clicking the button. Unity provides tremendous amounts of resources and has a lot of community support. They have a store that they sell unique objects, like game characters and landscapes. The animations to these characters are a typically written in C# and are pretty complicated. With a lot of research, you can figure out how to modify them or use them to build a game. Be prepared for countless hours of research and video tutorials. It takes a while to learn all of its capabilities. You might want to look at an online certification program that will help teach you the software.
You can make games in any language, so if you know something else then just make it in that. If you're more of a C++ fan you can use Unreal Engine. A lot of people prefer Unity because it's stupid easy to learn. I've used it a lot so shoot me a PM if you need any guidance. You can use C#, JavaScript, or Boo (a weird derivative of Python) to script with Unity. I'd suggest C# only because that's what I use, but JavaScript is becoming more and more popular outside of game dev so that might be a better investment.