Your first point sounds so childish, especially for someone who claims they’ve spent over 20 years working with JS. Seriously that’s like a high schooler jab when they take an argument too seriously and don’t have much to say.

The only reason for the lint rule is consistency. There’s the same option to never have semicolons, and will flag an error if you do put one.

Also, saying you’d hate to look at code without semicolons to me just sounds naive. It sounds like you’ve never worked in many languages where semicolons don’t exist. Half the languages I use don’t use semicolons, especially functional ones, and Python. The only difference between them is that they’re there or not, and that’s about it.

Also, I disagree with the “intent” part. Intent makes what the author of the code’s ideas more clear. Semicolons don’t change that, they’re just a “necessary” language construct. You put them there, or you don’t. Maybe if you’re just getting used to programming, and you’re not sure where the semicolons would go, you could need it. But then again, in a world without them, even that wouldn’t matter.