title: Does ES6 const affect garbage collection?
body: <p>In Kyle Simpson's new title, <em>You don't know JS: ES6 and beyond</em>, I find the following snippet:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>WARNING Assigning an object or array as a constant means that value will not be able to be garbage collected until that constant’s lexical scope goes away, as the reference to the value can never be unset. That may be desirable, but be careful if it’s not your intent!</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>(Excerpt From: Simpson, Kyle. “You Don’t Know JS: ES6 &amp; Beyond.” O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2015-06-02. iBooks. 
  This material may be protected by copyright.)</p>
  
  <p>As far as I can see, he doesn't expand on this, and 10 minutes on Google turns up nothing. Is this true, and if so, what does "the reference to the value can never be unset" mean <em>exactly</em>? I have got into the habit of declaring variables that won't be changed as <code>const</code>, is this a bad habit in real concrete performance/memory terms?</p>