Makes sense, I've certainly heard of people taking that approach. When I started working on decaffeinate, Prettier didn't exist and ESLint autofixing could only handle very simple cases.

Out of curiosity, were you using CoffeeScript 2? As I was doing research for this post, I noticed that the CoffeeScript 2 output was pretty good compared to what I had seen with CoffeeScript 1, although I think decaffeinate still gives better results in many cases. CoffeeScript 2 also had some small breaking changes, whereas with decaffeinate I needed to stay true to the exact language semantics, so arguably decaffeinate is safer than CS2 when run on a CS1 codebase.