i've always had an instinct to distrust people that are popular, because people seem to be generally gullible and credulous, in fact i tend to be conservative in this same way about technology. i refused to use go modules for a year after they came out, then i caved and it was good, but still was buggy. i refused to use LLMs because all i ever saw from people using it was garbage, but then i caved, tried a few, and found that my preferred IDE had one that seemed like it was actually better than any others i'd heard of.

people who set trends tend to promote things that are still barely late alpha, so my instinct about not trusting them continues to be validated over and over again. i mean, i took 3 years to catch on to bitcoin. i was early at some things, like Tor.