Comment by tombert

> are they still using it because they don't want to admit to themselves that they've completely lost control?

I think this is the case, or at least close.

I think a lot of people are still convincing themselves that they are the ones "writing" it because they're the ones putting their names on the pull request.

It reminds me of a lot of early Java, where it would make you feel like you were being very productive because everything that would take you eight lines in any other language would take thirty lines across three files to do in Java. Even though you didn't really "do" anything (and indeed Netbeans or IntelliJ or Eclipse was likely generating a lot of that bootstrapping code anyway), people would act like they were doing a lot of work because of a high number of lines of code.

Java is considerably less terrible now, to a point where I actually sort of begrudgingly like writing it, but early Java (IMO before Java 21 and especially before 11) was very bad about unnecessary verbosity.