I think it's controversial because you have a really good point but your example kind of goes against your point rather than supporting it. '===' is a single o

I think it's controversial because you have a really good point but your example kind of goes against your point rather than supporting it. '===' is a single operator in JS, just as '==' is. It's only superfluous in terms of character count (which barely matters at all), as opposed to token count or actual complexity. I'd argue that in the important metrics, '==' is actually more superfluous, in that it has a broader scope of functionality than '==='. When you use '==' to do an equality check you're essentially invoking something that does the check, but also does a bunch of implicit type conversion and checking between types, none of which you actually care about at all. I'm also not a fan of 'defensive programming', I think people fuck a lot of perfectly good code up trying to read the tea leaves about how other devs are going to poorly interact with it in the future. But using '===' is like saying "I just want to check equality". It's not adding something for the sake of defense (other than the single character), it's removing something useless for the sake of removing something useless. Which is a good thing for maintainability and bug prevention yada yada, but it also feels nice to do as a dev. That's why you see very few people arguing against '===' as a best practice, because incentives are mostly aligned in this case. It's not really like a lot of the other examples where something is seen as a 'best practice' in spite of being something that devs hate doing.