Why do I wish broken things didn't work?
I often find myself frustrated that broken things still work. What's the point of having rules and standards and ways things should be if it doesn't matter whether they're followed? I'm starting to suspect that the answer is that there is no point, and all those rules only exist to give us the illusion of order and security, which in reality don't exist at all.
Take the web. Invalid HTML will render just fine in most browsers. This was an explicit design choice in the early days of the web, and the on-the-record reason is that
it was decided that allowing people to get their content published was more important than making sure the syntax was absolutely correct. The web would probably not be as popular as it is today, if it had been more strict from the very beginning.
Maybe MDN is right and the web wouldn't have taken off the way it did if it were stricter. Maybe not. But there's probably something to that. Similar arguments are made about English being so casual and flexible and also the lingua franca of our time.
Letting go of gendered nouns and case inflections and welcoming more new words into the dictionary every year than other languages, along with having no central governing body dictating the grammar, makes English much easier to learn and much more flexible to accommodate local usage than other languages.
Of course it's also because the British once did and now the Americans do dominate global affairs, but lots of other nations have had global empires at one point or another and none of their languages succeeded in becoming the worldwide default for business and science.
Anyway these things grate on my personality. I often find myself wishing that broken HTML would simply break the website so that someone would fix it. But what would end up really happening is that the page would end up abandoned. Why do I have such a hard time accepting that “mediocre but exists” is better than “does not exist at all”? Perfectionism is taunting me, trying to convince me once again that if something is not done well and exactly to spec, it's wrong and bad and not worth doing.
Anyway, I think there's a lesson there. Sacrificing purity and adherence to arbitrary rules for the sake of inclusion and moving tf on with your life is the right move.