I totally agree with you, 100%. I can't lie, it made me sad when I saw the team starting to turn against Knockout, as the benefits it brings in the points I made above (as well as consistency and maintainability, as you brought up) are real - and often frontend projects suffer greatly for want of these very benefits.
I've never been good at convincing people of things, however, so it's been an uphill battle - one that I lost a lot of ground on early, and I feel like a lot of our frontend codebase suffered as a result. I do feel like they're slowly starting to warm up to the benefits of it now that they've had some maintenance problems with the current approach, but that's similar to sending an innocent man to prison for several years before discovering he's innocent - it'll take a while to undo what's been done, if it can be undone.
Now, none of this is to say that they're bad developers. They make amazing UIs that I couldn't even conceptualize (me being a backend jockey who is terrible at making things look good). It's hard for someone to hear about an entirely new approach to what they've been doing for 5-10 years and to accept it off the bat, so I don't blame them at all. I do still hope that they'll come over entirely to the concept. We'll see what happens. :)
Seems like the frontend developers who are told to never use onclick= handlers have never used a more advanced UI framework before, like Apple's Interface Builder for example. In more advanced js frameworks like Ember.js, all the click handlers are essentially onclick= style. "this is the right way of doing things"
I feel like many of your team's complaints are due to the fact that they are old school web developers who have probably never wrote apps on the desktop before, where 2-way bindings are standard. The jQuery style of event binding is extremely brittle because it requires the DOM to have a specific structure.
I've never been good at convincing people of things, however, so it's been an uphill battle - one that I lost a lot of ground on early, and I feel like a lot of our frontend codebase suffered as a result. I do feel like they're slowly starting to warm up to the benefits of it now that they've had some maintenance problems with the current approach, but that's similar to sending an innocent man to prison for several years before discovering he's innocent - it'll take a while to undo what's been done, if it can be undone.
Now, none of this is to say that they're bad developers. They make amazing UIs that I couldn't even conceptualize (me being a backend jockey who is terrible at making things look good). It's hard for someone to hear about an entirely new approach to what they've been doing for 5-10 years and to accept it off the bat, so I don't blame them at all. I do still hope that they'll come over entirely to the concept. We'll see what happens. :)