Wait.. are people actually complaining about these things? You're correct about its intended use, I'd be heavily offended if someone actually spewed "const obj = {} is better" because that's apples and oranges, enums aren't meant to store lookup values. Enum exists to create type-correctness attached to a name rather than a value. They're designed to reduce human error on arbitrary values. It's best to think of an enum's values as being capable of changing every time the application restarts (even though in reality they don't unless the body of the enum is changed).