I was just referring to how pipes make these kinds of chained function calls more readable. But on your point, I think using Date.now() is perfectly ok.
This is why we have tests which we need to update every 3 months, because somebody said this. This is of course, after a ton of research went into finding out why the heck our tests broke suddenly.
I would call those badly-written tests. The current date/time exists outside the system and ought to be acceptable for mocks, and in python we have things like freezegun that make it easy to control without the usual pitfalls of mocks.
What are those mock pitfalls, which are avoided by freezegun which is a mock according even to them? IoC and Clocks solve the same problem. So what are the pitfalls of using those instead of this other mock?