In many ways it parallels what people do in C: until you get to the scale where precise logging and style enforcement matters, you just forge ahead in the path

In many ways it parallels what people do in C: until you get to the scale where precise logging and style enforcement matters, you just forge ahead in the path of least resistance. So like you said, they printf or console.log, use lint or jshint, use -Wall or "use strict" etc. Btw I prefer console.error :)