Replacing ‘that = this’ assignments in Javascript with Arrow Functions

In a previous post, I was explaining how a that = this assignment was required to preserve the value of the this variable in certain scenarios. This post will focus on how to resolve them using arrow functions.

What does ‘that = this’ in Javascript mean?

When you go through some of the popular JS libraries you might start noticing this peculiar line all over the place.

that = this
that.someFunction();

First impressions, you could figure out that it had something to do with the value of the variable this being inconsistent, so they had to store in a variable and use it later. So I did some digging into it and found out why this assignment was a necessity back then and how we can overcome them.