You seem to keep missing that it has a different effect on scope and therefore you are incorrect in insisting it does "the same thing"

Also, your tone is bad.

At some point things have to stop being called "syntax changes". Just because you can represent the same operation by pressing more keys doesn't mean that it's not useful to add an abstraction on top of it to ease cognitive load, otherwise we'd all be programming with switches.

I think a better argument would have been that adding something that appears to just be a shorthand for writing functions is a potential footgun to language newcomers, but I think that argument is still relatively weak.

Then lets "abstract" your first sentience:

At point have stop called . Just you represent same by more doesn't that not to an on of to cognitive , otherwise all programming switches.

My point is, removing "function" and "return" from the syntax, won't necessary easy cognitive load, at least not for senior JavaScript coders. It will save bandwidth though! :P

Yes, but if you write a few thousand of those arrow functions, you will hate the useless function (a) { return b; } stuff, too.

If you're writing a few thousand functions, you're doing something very wrong.

It's like when languages make threads easy to create - and then programmers go away and use threads for everything!

Maybe some verbosity is a good thing because it makes programmers think about whether they really want to do something a few thousand times.

Javascript is a functional language. You _should_ be writing many functions, possibly thousands in a large codebase.

Javascript has first-class functions and anonymous functions, but so do lots of imperative languages, and there are plenty of other reasons to see Javascript as an imperative language. The reason we end up writing many anonymous functions is because we are using interfaces like foo.map(...) instead of interfaces like for-loops which take a block as a body (because Javascript for-loops are unbearably clumsy, e.g. iterating over properties instead of elements).

You find it harder to read because you're not used to it, that's all. Once you absorb the syntax it'll feel more native, and you'll format it in a fashion that makes it easier for you to absorb at a glance.