Brian Geffon discusses the evolution of JavaScript execution on servers from early frameworks like JSP to modern approaches using client-side templating and server-side rendering. He outlines key problems that arose like long loading times and SEO issues. Server-side rendering helped address these by allowing JavaScript execution on servers. However, this introduced new challenges around context pollution from shared JavaScript engines and garbage collection tuning. Overall techniques like request isolation, execution timeouts, and optimized garbage collection are needed to safely support server-side JavaScript rendering at scale.