and then someone always follows up with "Please don't ever do this", without explaining WHY you should never do this:
Get my hopes up finding an old forum post asking my question, hoping to find answers. All the answers are "use Google/etc", which is how I got there.
This used to be done quite a lot in the early JS days when scope was kind of thrown out the window (no pun) and you just did whatever dirty thing you needed to in order to make a page work.
> It's has been explained enough times. It's just that looking things up for yourself seems to have gone out of fashion.
It appears you've countered your own complaint.