As somone that use to write a lot of functional-style code (in ruby), and generally prefers functional style, and have created many many many "pipelines" like that in ruby code - I've actually started to "regress" to "status-quo" (as the article puts it) mostly because I work with developers that don't understand functional style and it just becomes point of contention in review that I just don't care about getting into anymore. I can see this same kind of thing happening with this operator in JS-land (I may be wrong, haven't written any significant javascript in years, but people tend to be stubborn).

I just write things as stupidly as possible now, and just do the second one even though there are nicer "ruby-ways" to do them - maybe this is "bad" but I find it easy to read and grok...and it doesn't cause arguments during review <.<