The problem is that tools like ESlint often come with highly opinionated rules that might not even be applicable all of the time (leading to me having to manually turn them off via annotations)

And there's no centralized idea on best practices.

And best practices depend.

Recently, I discovered that the ruff linter for Python doesn't like the assert statement, because since it does nothing in "optimized" mode it isn't reliable. But such complaints about unit tests are not particularly useful.

ESLint is the centralized idea I suppose, but getting consensus is difficult.

When it comes to formatting, there's other languages (Go, Python?) that have clear, top-down guidelines applied by tooling, at least for code style. I think that's clever, and besides the odd mailing list post trying to change it because of a personal preference, it minimizes discussions about trivialities over the really important things.

Because 2 vs 4 spaces or line length discussions are ultimately futile; those aren't features, individual preferences don't matter. Codebases have millions of lines and thousands of developers; individual opinions do not matter at scale, consistency does.

eslint is slow and has terrible UX. Use Biome instead.