Truly. That operator has most of the gravity that pulls me towards coffeescript.
Lodash things, like _.isNil staunch the bleeding, but it's just.. not the same.
I wrote coffeescript for 3 years, and the first 2 or 3 months was a frustrating learning curve. By the end of that job I really drank the koolaid. Coffeescript can be blissful. The complaints about invisible delimiters and stuff resonated with me for the first 2 weeks, but then I just learned it like you learn anything. If you are unsure what's going to happen, add extra parenthesis. I kept a window with js2.coffee on it so I could paste uncanny snippets while I was getting up to speed. After I got over the curve I stopped needing it.
I think it was more frustrating in the beginning than learning most things because I knew JS pretty well prior and it felt like I was throwing my experience out the window. I'm glad I did it though. Writing coffeescript was really quite pleasant. Now regular javascript has jumped forward a bit and has somethings coffeescript doesn't, I still feel like the one true web language exists somewhere between them.
I'm leading a project right now and every couple of days I get that coffeescript itch. Caffeine is hard to put down once you're addicted.
No! It seems you've never learned Coffeescript well enough to know the differences, just like too many other ES6 proponents.