Cloning is super useful and not a code smell at all in several scenarios. My most common use is for delta detection and json-patch based APIs. I keep the orig

Cloning is super useful and not a code smell at all in several scenarios. My most common use is for delta detection and json-patch based APIs. I keep the original entity and allow the user to modify a clone. When it's time to sync, I compare it to the original to generate a patch set to send to the server with json-patch [1] semantics. I highly recommend the excellent fast-json-patch library [2] that makes this process a breeze. Actually, I use its deepClone method outside of json-patch scenarios, it's so well implemented. [1] https://jsonpatch.com/ https://jsonpatch.com/ [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/fast-json-patch https://www.npmjs.com/package/fast-json-patch