I have a corollary to this: there are a series of
exponential increases in usage counts between each of:
1. Language designers & standard lib developers.
2. Shared module or library developers.
3. Ordinary developers.
4. End-users.
For many languages, the ratios are on the order of 1,000x at each stage, so for each 1x language designer there might be 1,000 people designing and publishing modules for it, a million developers, and a billion users. Obviously these numbers change dramatically depending on the specific circumstances, but the orders of magnitude are close enough for a qualitative discussion.
The point is that the tiniest bit of laziness at the first or second tiers has a dramatic multiplicative effect downstream. A dirty hack to save a minute made by someone "for their own convenience" at step #1 can waste literally millions of hours of other people's precious lives. Either because they're waiting for slow software, or frustrated by a crash, or waiting for a feature that took too long to develop at steps #2 or #3.
It takes an incredible level of self-discipline and personal ethics to maintain the required level of quality in the first two steps. Conversely, it deeply saddens me every time I hear someone defending an unjustifiable position to do with core language or standard library design.
"You just have to know the full history of why this thing has sharp edges, and then you'll be fine! Just be eternally vigilant, and then it's not a problem. As long as you don't misuse it, it's not unsafe/insecure/slow/problematic." is the type of thing I hear regularly when discussing something that I just know will be tripping up developers for decades, slowing down software for millions or billions.