I get your point. However I recently encountered 5 year old javascript and it was horrible. Full out jQuery and the (function(export){})(arg) pattern. And lots

I get your point. However I recently encountered 5 year old javascript and it was horrible. Full out jQuery and the (function(export){})(arg) pattern. And lots of dead test in some some long gone test library. But your point is valid if it were CoffeeScript and jQuery. That would be even worse for sure. There is no relief in sight and it'll suck for a long time because everything is very fluid everywhere. Legacy will suck. But if you want to be as productive and confident as you can these days; my take it is to not engange in vanilla JavaScript.