Some time back when researching for Backbone JS stuff (I can't remember for what now), I encountered this post Lessons learned while working with Backbone.js. This post was written a few years back, but I was still able to glean some gems from it. Specifically, the section "Simplified Object Copying" was something that could be applied on plain vanilla JavaScript. The other section "Changing in referenced object does not trigger events"

Backbone events are a powerful way to write responsive user interfaces with fewer lines of codes. This article attempts to give a detailed breakdown of the events and the parameters available for the callback functions. The results in this article are applicable for version 1.2.3 of Backbone.js The test is performed by instantiating instances of ExperimentModel extended from Backbone.Model and ExperimentCollection extended from Backbone.Collection. The model is first added to the collection to test "