Five Legacy JavaScript Patterns That Modern ES6+ Features Made Obsolete

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A developer revisiting an old custom CMS codebase encountered several JavaScript patterns that were once standard but have since been replaced by modern language features. The self/that variable trick for preserving execution context became unnecessary once arrow functions introduced lexical scoping in ES6. The void(0) href pattern, once used to make anchor tags act as non-navigating buttons, faded as semantic HTML and better event handling became the norm. Deeply nested callbacks, notorious for creating unreadable 'pyramid' code, were largely eliminated by Promises and the async/await syntax introduced in ES2017. Immediately Invoked Function Expressions (IIFEs), previously essential for preventing variable leakage into the global scope, became less critical after ES6 modules and block-scoped let and const declarations arrived.

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