> How did they ship pattern matching in 2023, with a million examples of how to do it right already hashed out and in the wild... and then not figure out a wildcard symbol for 2 years?

We shipped support for `_` as wildcards in patterns with Dart 3.0 when pattern matching first shipped.

However, prior to Dart 3.0, `_` was already a valid identifier (as it is in most other languages). The feature you're mentioning from last year was to remove support for uses of `_` as an identifier outside of patterns. This way `_` consistently behaves like a wildcard everywhere in the language. We didn't ship that in 3.0 because it's a breaking change and those are harder to roll out without causing a lot of user pain.

It's OK to not like Dart. There are multiple popular languages for a reason. But it is helpful when communicating about a language to others to be accurate so that they can make their own informed opinions.