Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse.

Like black market steroids except with less track record

The health problems associated with obesity are very real (not to mention that it makes you look worse), GLP-1 agonists really do work for most people to cause significant weight loss, and it's currently difficult to get them prescribed by a legitimate doctor unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe. This will probably change over the next several years, but in the meantime buying them from a grey market Chinese pharmacy works now, and is reasonably safe and effective.

It's wild to me in the sense that I wouldn't do it, but not wild in the sense that it's surprising.

This isn't anything new. Certainly it's easier nowadays to get stuff from overseas than it was 15+ years ago. But those black market steroids you mention probably weren't much (or any?) safer, honestly, regardless of track record.

People have been experimenting with drugs for longer than I've been alive, and will continue doing so long after I've turned to dust. San Francisco, in particular, has a long and storied history with the sort of experimentation described in this article. The author seems to have made the mistake of thinking that this sort of thing is incredibly common and "everyone is doing it" here, but I have no doubt that it does exist and people do it.

Some people always want the ‘hack’ or easy way out. It’s unsurprising to me.

It’s wild, but unsurprising to me. Coke, “noots”, and psilocybins were big a decade ago and the same argument could be made about their provenance and origin.

I was close to a name brand pre-workout company and the FDA would play whack-a-mole with their formulas and they were on store shelves in every US city.