On the point about semicolons in JavaScript, the logic I’ve heard is that if you consistently use semicolons, you can have a linter warn you if there is an inferred semicolon, so you know if you have made a mistake. If you don’t use semicolons and accidentally produce code with an inferred semicolon that should not be there, then there is no way for any tool to warn you. (Well, no general way; in your example with the return, many linters would warn you about unreachable code.)