TL;DR: obj[key] with user-controlled key == "__proto__" is a gift that keeps on giving; buy our AI tool that will write subtle vulnerabilities like that which you yourself won’t catch in review but then it will also write some property-based tests that maybe will
For real. The bullet-point summary at the beginning with a "Why this matters for..." immediately followed by, "This isn't just a theoretical exercise—it's a real example of..." Dead giveaways.
Theoretically a good fuzzer could discover this value by itself, but I don’t believe anything like that exists that could run JS code and explore VM-level branches, at least not for JS code that’s even this complex. Otherwise, yes, PBT is less trivial than it seems, though I’m guessing a simple `strings jsc` coupled with general knowledge of special values of other types[1,2] could get you quite far.
The code in TFA is, by a hair’s breadth, not actually vulnerable, as long as the type signature of the function is obeyed. React spinned the same gun in the game of Russian roulette but was less lucky.