I don't disagree, but I also suspect that a very large number of real world JavaScript applications have few to no application-induced cycles. I might even go

I don't disagree, but I also suspect that a very large number of real world JavaScript applications have few to no application-induced cycles. I might even go further and say this extends beyond JavaScript--the most common reason I even define recursive data structures in a language like Rust is for AST-like data that almost invariably forms a tree.