You don't want to live in a society where an increasingly large percentage of the population have nothing to lose.
Regardless of whether it benefits our industry or socioeconomic status, it'd be incredibly shortsighted to just do all of that at the expense of the lower classes.
I can think of one valuable use-case: parsing through JSON responses for APIs with poor fields/response documentation -- especially if you have to parse through a ton of information.
I agree. Its a coin flip. We don't know what the long term effects of COVID are, we don't know what the long term effects of the vaccine are. I'd argue that we know more about what COULD happen with the vaccine long term and I'd rather place my bets on that. The alternative is hiding away for 20+ years and not getting vaccinated or contracting COVID, obviously not feasible.
I think that's where the confusion lies. Are people suggesting someone to write their own auth from the ground up, or write auth in coordination with their stack's auth library of choice?
"I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around."
On the flip side, the people that are told this are the ones that are annoyingly attempting to maintain their bad eating habits while just adding exercise, or adding fab foods, or anything really to delude themselves into thinking they can continue to eat the same way.