I rarely write Javascript, so I'm not in tune with the community, but when I have I have had no trouble passing database handles and such things around like I'm

I rarely write Javascript, so I'm not in tune with the community, but when I have I have had no trouble passing database handles and such things around like I'm used to in every other language I work with more frequently. It appears all this does is avoids needing to manually call close (or equivalent)? While that is a nice addition, helping to avoid the situation where you forget, why does globals become the alternative? Isn't simply calling close manually the best option at the moment?