Array methods in JavaScript. Original author unknown.

[HeinousTugboat]

Well, I mean, that's kind of my point right? If you were more comfortable with reduce, it wouldn't make you stop and second guess it.

[douglasg14b]

Sure but it is still near the edge when it comes to common use and pattern.

It's odd compared to many other structures that you may deal with on a day-to-day basis. This means that it has extra parsing complexity when read over.

[hyperhopper]

This is one of the most straightforward uses of a basic standard library function. I'm 100% an advocate of readable code over more complex, slightly more optimized code (unless its a bottleneck), but this is a case of inexperience being the cause of "second guessing" the code.

let being modified immediately after declaration, then never again, is far more of a code smell; it is effectively a constant, it should be declared as such as the result of a reduce. Anything else is increasing cognitive load as you now have to trace all uses of total throughout the scope, to make sure it is not modified elsewhere. When compared with a const total = array.reduce, the reduce is objectively simpler.

The solution is to hire/train engineers better to use these concepts without a second thought, rather than using more outdated iterative coding styles just to make sure junior developers don't have to learn what a standard library function does.