A first moment proof of the Johansson-Molloy theorem

We give a short proof of a stronger form of the Johansson-Molloy theorem which relies only on the first moment method. The proof adapts a clever counting argument developed by Rosenfeld in the context of non-repetitive colourings. We then extend that result to graphs where each neighbourhood has bounded density, which improves a recent result from Davies et al. Focusing on tightening the number of colours, we obtain the best known upper bound for the chromatic number of triangle-free graphs of maximum degree $\Delta \ge 224$.