On the other hand, if you think of access to argument names as part of the Javascript language, then a "minifier" that threw out that information would by definition not be a Javascript minifier - it would be a minifier of a subset of the language.

lol. i have to laugh at this. it is not normal to write a framework that requires exact argument names in userland code. it is completely strange and unusual for something to break just because an argument name was renamed; this data is theoretically private to the function. The only reason this is not the case in Angular is because of the insane hack of stringifying functions. This is a violation of how things are designed and assumed to work in JavaScript. You don’t run functions by toStringing them and eval-ing them; you just call them... anything else is an experiment, not a supported use.