Well good!

Honestly the point of this article isn’t trying to say that using a loop is “wrong,” just that if you take the time to get comfortable with reduce, you might see that it’s a lot more useful than you think. In the array total example, it’s hard to argue against reduce, since it’s what it was designed for. That video (which really shows how terrible my timing is) also says that’s just fine. And the funny part is, I really agree with most of their examples, if you’re trying to return an array, use map, if you’re filtering…use filter. But the examples of object building, their “simplified” solutions actually seem less readable. Like this “bad” example using reduce here:

const events = Object.keys(this.state.events);
const handlers = events.reduce((events, event) => {
  events[event] = this.eventDidFire.bind(this, event);
  return events;
}, {});

Using reduce seems really straightforward compared to their solution below:

const handlers = 
  Object.fromEntries(Object.entries(this.state.events)
    .map([key, value]) => ([
      key,
      this.eventDidFire.bind(this, key)
    ])));

Their version requires a a function with a callback chained to an iterator using array destucturing to handle the argument to create a tuple which is then transformed into a final object by the initial function, with 4 levels of indentation. Reduce is one callback with standard arguments in 2 lines using an object.

But ultimately, I think you’re right. I was trying to do an interesting use case, with a fancy one line solution to get people hyped, and I didn’t do a good job. Teaching stuff online through text is hard, and I’m really glad people nicely comment on stuff, because if it never “clicks” for the reader, I haven’t explained it well enough. I should put the real world explanation first, and then the fancy one as a bonus. I do hope I haven’t turned you off further from using reduce. It’s not a super common iterator, but when it’s used right, it can really be a useful method.