old-reddit-redirect VS coffeescript

Sorry this doesn't answer the question you asked, but why not use the old reddit redirect extension?

Has been tested with other extensions disabled, but for context, I use Old Reddit Redirect and RES

I have a browser addon installed (chrome/firefox, link for anyone interested) that redirects to old reddit even when logged out e.g. in private windows, and it works perfectly 👌

I just use this extension to redirect it, also have RES setup along with Masstagger. On the phone I use RIF.

This breaks the Old Reddit Redirect extension, which uses this redirect mechanism to gracefully redirect direct links to galleries to the full old reddit post. See https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issues/72 for more context.

That said, there are ways to embrace the JS ecosystem without actually using JavaScript. Many popular languages have transpilers that will convert code written in that particular language into something that will run natively in a web browser (in other words, JavaScript). Even TypeScript is a language that gets transpiled into JavaScript, so it's not that outrageous of a concept, it just gets more difficult to do the further you get away from languages that don't already look like JavaScript.

As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language.

CoffeeScript

On the other hand, companies choose React because that's where all the developers are. If you want to build something that can be maintained years from now, you better not choose the next hype train that goes straight to nowhere (remember CoffeeScript ?). You want something battle tested that has stood the test of time, where you won't have trouble finding developers to scale once you need to. And nobody ever got fired for choosing React.