One of the main difference is it is based on IPFS
I once tried to fix a bug that I found in GUN but I gave up after just trying to figure out what the code is supposed to do.
old school javascript like this have an advantage: you can ship as is, without the need to obfuscate under the excuse of performance.
if you load two hundred build dependencies and then write twenty word long variables, it might look nice for you at development, but a user trying to debug or validate code on the fly would be in a very bad position as you would have to 'minify' (i.e. obfuscate) to not have a 70mb production file.
Code like this is very readable if you know some conventions, things like `cb` being a callback pointer. Its not even close to the cryptic knowledge needed to read assembly on weird platforms, for example. And a far cry from obfuscated.
> load two hundred build dependencies and then write twenty word long variables [...] a very bad position as you would have to 'minify' (i.e. obfuscate) to not have a 70mb production file
You defeated your own argument here. You're saying it's nice that the code is obfuscated already (short variables) so you can get better performance, it's really the same thing - except doing it by hand has a lot of downsides.
Minifiers and source maps have been around for a long time to get you the best of both worlds, understandable code in development, minified code in production (even though gzip alone gives you 80-90% of the gains). There is absolutely no reason to write obfucasted code like this [1] where you need to guess the meaning of thirty different one-letter variables. Grep'ing the code becomes impossible. This has nothing to do with 'old school' JS, but universal code standards.
( Not sure "obfuscated" is the word I'd use, though. )