[remich]

They can be useful if you're working in situations where preserving and using the correct form of _this_ is necessary. Could be a situation with funky legacy code or writing library/utility functions (like an implementation of debounce) where you can't be certain of the context in which your function is going to be used.

These don't come up a ton in modern code bases in part because of the advent of arrow functions, and in part because of the general trend towards FP / declarative programming in JS/TS and away from OOP / "class" use and thus less need for managing "this" throughout an application. Also most of the time if you really need a utility function it's easier to rely on a bulletproof dependency library like Ramda/Lodash/Underscore... concerns about bundle size notwithstanding.

Another use case is if you need to use array methods on array-like things (this comes up sometimes with DOM manipulation). These data structures are iterables but lack the native array methods like map/filter/reduce etc. If for some reason you can't/don't want to create a new array from your data structure to operate on you can do something like Array.prototype.filter.call(myNodeList, filterFunction). Also not terribly common in modern codebases, but useful to be aware of!