“Historically, accessing the global object has required different syntax in different JavaScript environments. On the web you can use window, self, or frames - but in Web Workers only self will work. In Node.js none of these work, and you must instead use global.

The globalThis property provides a standard way of accessing the global this value (and hence the global object itself) across environments. Unlike similar properties such as window and self, it’s guaranteed to work in window and non-window contexts. In this way, you can access the global object in a consistent manner without having to know which environment the code is being run in. To help you remember the name, just remember that in global scope the this value is globalThis.”

~Mark Twain while not a contributor to the original javascript, Twain did offer many insights on it later in life.