Comment by ffsm8

Then I do not believe you understood the article you've commented on, because it essentially about the thing you handwaved away via

> Then you can format the Date.now() number it into whatever other format you want.

The while thing is about how to transition from a date, wherever it's string or timestamp to a date object. The idea is that you'll either format it to a string, do equality checks, calculate durations etc after after. Your idea of using timestamps doesn't address anything the article was about