I’ve seen the transition occur in my company where DX is trumping backwards compatibility, “simplicity”, and inter team cohesion.
If you can’t bother to write the if statement that guarantees backward compatibility and follows a defined standard in use for almost 20 years, you are a horrid engineer IMO.
This is why there’s a general trend toward all things becoming complicated, brittle, and shitty.
Hopefully nobody is writing if statements in code to handle backwards compatibility. That would be terribly unmaintainable. This should be handled at the compiler level. In javascript world, it is fairly simple to use Webpack or the like to target whatever browser versions you wish to support.
If you're not using a compiler, you should definitely not use the latest and greatest features, unless you are well aware that you will not be supporting older browsers.
That’s literally how all polyfills work. They first check if the thing is there, and if not then implement it.
And in this case you can simply do an if statement with (first && first.second && first.second.third)
My point being, writing one long line is how the language inherently works. Use that instead of the new feature that only ships in new browsers. I’d still be upset if one of my teammates added an entire bundling system so they can simply write fewer lines for such simple menial aspects of the code. Forest for the trees.
If you can’t bother to write the if statement that guarantees backward compatibility and follows a defined standard in use for almost 20 years, you are a horrid engineer IMO.
This is why there’s a general trend toward all things becoming complicated, brittle, and shitty.