No no no. Teaching people to only use a semicolon in some cases is even worse. It's far better to just tell them to use semicolons everywhere, as they should. ASI is an error-correction mechanism, after all.

i'll make you a deal: if you can find a bug caused by me not using semicolons in any of my github repos from the last year i will add a section into jsforcats about using semicolons

Well, you're not a beginner, so it doesn't really apply to you. Consistency and completeness are very important to avoid confusion.

teaching to a broad audience means balancing the likelihood that the learner will be in over their head (too much information) with the likelihood that they will have a negative experience stemming from lack of information (bug due to missing semicolon). given javascript and its many bad parts I believe the first scenario to be much more likely than the second, especially for an introductory text.

Yeah. I don't want begginers to be caught out.