ember-no-implicit-this-codemod VS ember-render-modifiers

Glimmer component templates reflect this by using the @ prefix when using arguments and the this. prefixes when accessing properties of the backing class. This way of working is also supported in classic components, even though arguments are in the same scope as local properties. This means the migration is non blocking, and luckily there’s a codemod available for this as well. The codemod however can’t make a distinction between arguments and local properties, and is something that will be cleaned up in a later phase.

A second issue was that lifecycle hooks that depended on this wrapping element no longer got invoked. Those lifecycle events contain the Element reference, e.g. didInsertElement. To migrate these we made use of the render-modifiers package. Ever since Glimmer and Octane, there are new ways to encapsulate this logic like using the constructor and destructor, writing custom modifiers, or using resources. For the sake of limiting the scope we opted to keep this a separate effort.

To call a setup/init function after the wrapper component was rendered you could make use of the ember-render-modifiers addon (https://github.com/emberjs/ember-render-modifiers).

What I like about Ember is that it gives a lot of rigid structure that, at least at one point, made it comparatively easy to work on multiple Ember based projects and be productive sooner.

As you've pointed out, a problem with that project is that there's a ton of intimate knowledge for how things work under the hood or why things are the way they are. They also seem to oscillate between opting for simplicity and opting for complexity and magic.

One example would be the latest version of Ember which doesn't even ship with `@ember/render-modifiers` by default despite how everyone will end up installing it anyway because it's necessary; they were talking about providing an alternative based on the actor model, despite modifiers being far easier to understand, somehow they are still wrong:

> Either way, we recommend using these modifiers with caution. They are very useful for quickly bridging the gap between classic components and Glimmer components, but they are still generally an anti-pattern.

https://github.com/emberjs/ember-render-modifiers

Why on earth did they reinvent components and ship them without providing the supposedly correct way of interacting with their lifecycle? You actually have to install a separate add-on to develop a production-ready app with Ember, which completely flies in the face of the idea that you can run `ember new` and have pretty much everything you need.

Strangely (an thankfully), the RFC for the needlessly complicated alternative for lifecycle interaction is effectively stalled:

https://github.com/emberjs/rfcs/pull/567

By their own language, the only official way to interact with component/element lifecycle is an antipattern.

/rant