I've been editing this in response to comments below, but I will preserve the full revision history.
Referencing the function execution context via this
is fairly common in JavaScript. I suspect some people like it because they come from a language like Java, and it’s familiar. However, I would argue that it in some cases introduces brittleness into one's code without bringing much benefit.
For example, let’s consider a contrived logger module:
function CountingLogger() {
if (!(this instanceof CountingLogger)) return new CountingLogger;