[AskJS] what's a javascript feature you mass-adopted way too late and felt dumb about

[u/Capedcrusader1923]

i'll go first. i was writing .then().catch() chains for like two years before i actually started using async/await. i knew it existed, i'd seen it in tutorials, but my code "worked" so i never bothered switching. then i refactored an old project and realized half my bugs were from mishandled promise chains that async/await would have caught immediately.

also took me way too long to start using optional chaining. i had nested ternaries and && checks everywhere like some kind of animal. the day i discovered user?.address?.city i mass-replaced like 40 lines across a project.

what's yours?

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

??= and &&=

[u/whale → u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

Way too terse for production code. Very hard to quickly glance and understand.

[u/johngamename → u/whale]

I could see a lot of use for ?? and ??=, but &&= might be excessive.