The return values change matters if you are chaining actions anywhere, which isn't that uncommon.
And yes, some people do have lots of views. In my current codebase we use Backbone.View as the base of all our frontend web components. This won't take us a day to update, but it's far from trivial, and we will have to regression test every component.
This should actually only take you 2 minutes if you'd like to keep the old behavior ... regardless of how many View classes you happen to have in your app. For example:
var originalView = Backbone.View;
Backbone.View = function(options) {
var instance = new originalView(options);
instance.options = options;
return instance;
};
And yes, some people do have lots of views. In my current codebase we use Backbone.View as the base of all our frontend web components. This won't take us a day to update, but it's far from trivial, and we will have to regression test every component.