`document.all` can be used in this way:

  <div id="foo"></div>
  <script>
    const { foo } = document.all
    // do something with foo
  </script>

Don't use it though, it's deprecated as well[1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/al...

You can make this yourself with Proxy. I get a lot of mileage out of this:

    // proxy to simplify loading and caching of getElementById calls
    const $id = new Proxy({}, {
        // get element from cache, or from DOM
        get: (tgt, k, r) => (tgt[k] || ((r = document.getElementById(k)) && (tgt[k] = r))),
        
        // prevent overwriting
        set: () => $throw(`Attempt to overwrite id cache key!`)
    });

Now if you have

    <div id="something></div>

You can just do

    $id.something.innerHTML = 'inside!';

The Netscape of the 90s wasn't interested in making features ‘safe’. They were about throwing out features as quickly as possible to see what would stick.

The simplest possible syntax is to make named elements available globally, and if that clashes with future additions to the DOM API then well that's a problem for some future idiots to worry about.

as a strategy it worked pretty well, unfortunately

As the article points out, this initiative was an 90s IE one and the Gecko team (Firefox, post-Netscape) were against it.