JavaScript is not EL. EL runs on the server. JavaScript runs on the client. They are 2 different languages, with only superficial syntactical similarities. There is zero benefit - or more accurately, negative benefit - to avoiding EL in JSF. It's an integral part of JSF, and in modern-day
J2EE servers the support is built into the appserver itself, even for minimalist servers like
Tomcat.
Also, there's a BIG difference between the "$" EL dereferencing operator and the "#" EL dereferencing operator. "$" is rarely used in JSF because of that.