[yashap]

This seems like a realllly weak reason to write less maintainable code (harder than it needs to be for future readers to reason about). For workflows like this, you can easily use let/var while prototyping. Then once you’re done and are cleaning up the code, writing tests, etc., switch to const if the reference is never re-assigned. It’s the same in every language - when prototyping, go wild with god functions, mutable state, public everything, whatever, but clean it up and make it readable/maintained before it gets merged to master.

Also, if you’re talking about leaving mutability like this in the code long term, this really only applies to GLOBAL mutable state, and global mutable state is a terrible thing for code maintainability in any language. If it’s not global, you can’t fiddle with it later in the console anyways. Littering your program with global mutable state just because “someday, someone may want to fiddle with this in the console, and this makes that slightly easier”, that’s just not a reasonable argument.