You know what Tait, I'd completely forgotten about those reasons that the helpers could be blocked! I know I've run into it a ton before with corporate blocking, but the consumer adblocking (which I myself run by default), will quietly kill a lot of your best designed javascript intentions.

That makes the assumption that you know where you user is located and what their personal preference is. US is MDY, Australia is DMY, Canada is…well, Canada officially observes all 3 variations. Which one do you use in that case? A global solution is designed to be the default with the highest likelihood of success. If you have information about your users' personal preferences, you could modify the interface for them. The trick is coming up with something that will work when you don't have the luxury of being able to ask them.

A global solution becomes more important when you don't have information regarding where the user is from or what format they are expecting. Someone that doesn't have an account, and hasn't already set up their language and formatting preferences, needs to have a solution that is going to provide both them and you with the highest likelihood of success without errors—especially if the information they are providing has legal or safety ramifications. So, why not guess where they are and what they want, because we do have formatting data? This doesn't work if you're designing a solution for users behind certain corporate networks or VPN's. I worked with designing solutions for users that work out of Spain, their IP shows up as coming out of Germany, and their corporate mandated language and formatting is all US and English.

Regarding YYYY-MM-DD, I'm most used to MDY having grown up in the US—but I'd be the first person to tell you it's a crazy format. YMD is the most logical way to break down a date due to the natural sorting and that it zeros in on the exact point, versus emanating from it. Honestly, try labeling files on your computer with the different formats and see the splendor that is YMD. Also, like I brought up in the video, it prevents a lot of assumptions by month and day-first writers—which is a real and rampant issue if you do have a global user base that are entering dates.

I have a bunch of resources and data points that I discovered while researching the video. I'd be happy to share them with you if you're interested! Thanks for watching!