> Its a footgun that results from JS’s loose typing of functions, allowing them both to be called with discarded arguments and to be flexible in the number of arguments they accept.

This just goes to show how one can use a language without actually understanding its core semantics. Additional arguments aren't "discarded" at all: they're still available to the called function in via `arguments`, they're just not required to be assigned a name in the function signature.

Basically, a Javascript function fn() declaration is equivalent to Python's def fn(*args): declaration and you have the option to assign a name to positional arguments. Any named positional argument that is not provided by the caller simply leaves the argument uninitialized, i.e. undefined.

It's a core concept of the language and I'm always puzzled when non-beginners struggle with this. That's also a very good reason to not use vanilla Javascript at all and skip straight to TypeScript and its brethren instead.