I’m not arguing against that. Merely providing some counterweight to the idea that the author was “flinging shit in the trenches” 😅

I found the title of that section slightly triggering too, but the argument they lay down actually makes sense. Consistency helps you to achieve correctness in large codebases, because it means you don’t have to reinvent what is correct over and over in separate pockets of the codebase. Such pockets also make incremental improvements to the codebase harder and harder, so they do come back to bite you.

Your example of vendors doesn’t relate to that, because you don’t control your vendor’s code. But you do control your organisation’s.

Another data structure that you can consider is the red green tree: https://willspeak.me/2021/11/24/red-green-syntax-trees-an-overview.html

We use it in Biome too, and it’s great for building trees that are immutable and yet still need frequent updates, as well as traversal in all directions. Its implementation contains quite a bit of unsafe to make it fast, though as a consumer you’re not really exposed to that.

There is a serious attempt for that actually: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

It doesn’t offer full compatibility with the regular TypeScript though, despite being very similar.