Seriously, why would you think that assigning a value would stop your script from executing? Maybe the Typescript example is missing some context, but it seems like such a weird case to present as a "data race".
It's obviously not a good idea to rely on such assumptions when programming, and when you find yourself having such a hunch, you should generally stop and verify what the specification actually says. But in this case, the behaviour is weird, and all bets are off. I am not at all surprised that someone would fall for this.
I'm sure I knew the href thing at one point. It's probably even in the documentation. But the API itself leaves a giant hole for this kind of misunderstanding, and it's almost certainly a mistake that a huge number of people have made. The more pieces of documentation we need to keep in our heads in order to avoid daily mistakes, the exponentially more likely it is we're going to make them anyway.
Good software engineering is, IMHO, about making things hard to hold the wrong way. Strong types, pure functions without side effects (when possible), immutable-by-default semantics, and other such practices can go a long way towards forming the basis of software that is hard to misuse.
This can be made into an extreme (e.g. C/Zig tries to make every line understandable locally - on the other extreme we have overloading any symbols, see Haskell/Scala).