Take away React, Vue, Angular, or similar away from most current front end developers and there is panic. When I say panic I mean full insanity panic like abandoning the profession or completely going postal.

——

A simple checklist to provide superior front end applications:

* Don’t use this. You (general hypothetical you) probably don’t realize how easily you can live without it only because you have never tried. Doing so will dramatically shrink and untangle your spaghetti code.

* Don’t use addEventListener for assigning events. That method was added around the time of ES5 to minimize disruption so that marketers could add a bunch of advertising, spyware, and metric nonsense everywhere more easily without asking permission from developers. That method complicated code management, is potentially point of memory leaks, and performs more slowly.

* Don’t use querySelectors. They are a crutch popularized by the sizzle utility of jQuery. These are super epic slow and limit the creative expression of your developers because there is so much they can’t do compared to other means of accessing the DOM.

I now add ESLint rules to my code to automate enforcement of that tiny checklist.

I think a bit of context about `this` is important.

Using `this` in a callback -- where you expect your caller to provide your local binding -- is straight-up bad juju. Pass arguments instead.

Using `this` in an object instance to namespace is just fine. The entire point of having an object is that you get these nice encapsulated namespaces which can send messages to each other.

One suggestion, and a related ask: rather than just saying "Don't do FOO", provide alternatives as well; e.g., "Don't use `addEventListener`, use `superFooBarBazzer`".

Bonus points awarded for runnable examples. :)

Perhaps my biggest gripe about the entire Javascript ecosystem is finding libraries that provide documentation that looks like this:

    // See how easy my library is to use!
    myLibrary.doTheThing(fooBar, bazBang);

40k loc. I wrote an ESLint rule to error on this in both statements and expressions.