That may be so, but the thing you are paid for depends on a colossal mountain of unpaid labor by tinkerers. There’s no job for you if people with real curiosity weren’t interested in installation and packaging, fixing bugs, Rust, CSS expressiveness, authorization expressiveness, virtual machines, standard library algorithms, etc. Something tells me the $250/mo you might spend on some GitHub sponsorships and Patreons - if even that - is not paying for anyone’s kids’ private schools.

And anyway, how useful is your code, really? I will not generalize or make assumptions, but you’re also not going to tell me what it is, right? So scrutiny for thee, but not for me?

And if it’s like, “I make Dagger wrapped implementations 17 layers deep in a Google product you’ve heard of”: by now you should know that the thing sincere people say about insincere people, “We watch what Hollywood says is good,” applies to shit that Google, Apple, Amazon and all these super high paying job companies do too. If you are conflating many users with useful, that’s the problem. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram could vanish tomorrow, and literally nothing meaningful would be lost.

Is “useful” to you, “everything that I do is useful, and everything I don’t do, maybe”? You don’t get to decide if your POVs are reductive. They just are.

I appreciate exposing yourself for a contrarian point of view, noble if fatally flawed.