[jefftk]

Regular isNaN is very tricky, and almost never what you want: it first coerces its input to a Number, and then checks if that is NaN:

                isNaN   Number.isNaN
                -----   ------------
    {}           true          false
    [true]       true          false
    undefined    true          false
    "{}"         true          false

[jaywalk]

But none of those things you listed are numbers. The isNaN output is exactly what I want in pretty much every case.

[jefftk]

isNaN does not tell you whether something is not a Number either. Applying isNaN to any of these returns false: null, true, false, [], "", "cabbage".