You could use a named function expression (in this case the function is named abc), like so:
let click = 0;
canvas.addEventListener('click', function abc(event) {
click++;
if (click >= 50) {
// remove event listener function `abc`
canvas.removeEventListener('click', abc);
}
// More code here ...
}
It looks like no one's covered the part of the current JavaScript DOM specification that gives you a mechanism to remove your event listener without using removeEventListener. If we look at https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-event-listener we see that there are a number of properties that can be passed to control event listening:
{
type (a string)
callback (null or an EventListener object)
capture (a boolean, initially false)
passive (a boolean, initially false)
once (a boolean, initially false)
signal (null or an AbortSignal object)
removed (a boolean for bookkeeping purposes, initially false)
}
Now, there's a lot of useful properties in that list, but for the purposes of removing an event listener it's the signal property that we want to make use of (which was added to the DOM level 3 in late 2020), because it lets us tell the JS engine to remove an event listener by just calling abort() instead of having to bother with removeEventListener:
(Note that this does not use the useCapture flag, because the useCapture flag is essentially completely useless)
And done: the JS engine will abort and clean up our event listener. No keeping a reference to the handling function, no making sure we call removeEventListener with the exact same properties as we called addEventListener: we just cancel the listener.