It's an action noone ever has ever wanted or ever will want to perform.
In the same way putting your finger inside a power socket is an invalid action, and people who designed sockets were smart enough to make it impossible.
That's not entirely true. Just look at one of the many burn addresses that people willingly send money to all the time, for example: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...
For example, some holder (maybe a founder) of a certain coin can burn a certain amount of their tokens, making it more rare. This is a quite common practice. If I were to burn a certain amount of tokens, I think the most natural thing to use as a burn address would be the contract address itself.
This transfer was a transfer from one address to another. No one has ever wanted to do that? It's the entire point of cryptocurrencies!
The fact that said protocol is incapable of addressing real needs is a failure state, and historically this has been addressed by building better tooling on top of the protocol, or replacing it wholesale.
The arguments here are odd. The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user. Yes, mistakes are expensive. Is that okay? In the same way that a nuclear power plant isn't designed for a rando to go in and operate it.
Yes, raw blockchain stuff is hard and non-experts should not interact directly.
The key question is, is the payoff worth building an entire system around? For nuclear power, yes, because it provides electricity for people to just plug into. For blockchain, maybe, maybe not.
It's the "right" address for certain transactions--like turning ETH into WETH--but the "wrong" address for other transactions, which makes the whole thing a garbage design. You can say "that's just the way Ethereum/crypto/smart contracts work" all day, but it doesn't matter.
Most people don't care why the design is bad, they just care that it is bad, and that there are better theoretical (or real) alternatives to this tech.
Sure, the user sent stuff to the wrong address... Or did he? Seems, rather, that he sent the wrong kind of stuff. Had he sent, whateveritwas, WETF in stead of WETH or vice versa, then it would have gone right.
So then it seems the receiving thingamajig was at least as much at fault: It accepted (and just swallowed) a kind of stuff it shouldn't receive. It's like, say, a one-way currency-changing ATM that takes dollars and returns euros. If you feed in euros by mistake, it fucking obviously should just spit them back out (and preferably display or print an error message, "Wrong currency: Gimme dollars to get euros.") You're saying just swallowing your euros would be a "valid" behaviour for that machine.
That's so obviously bullshit that the only remaining mystery here is whether you're actively trying to defend what you know is indefensible, or actually so deluded that you've somehow convinced yourself this bullshit is true. Well, no, not the only one: The other mystery is, which is worse?
Listen, in this case, there already is circuit breakers, ground fault circuit interrupters and more to prevent problems to happen in the first place. The wallet is the first guard against this, the UIs the various services provide is another, and so on.
But when the user bypasses those and interact directly with the chain, which is not recommended for people who don't know what they are doing, problems can happen.
The same as if someone bypasses all those checks you wrote about, and then complains that they got a ton of electricity zapped into them. Why doesn't the grid just know that it was a human and not something else and stopped sending electricity?!
Reality is not that simple.
This is not the case of a non-intuitive system screwing the user. This is the user purposefully avoiding using the intuitive systems setup for them, and interacting with something directly even though no one does that unless you're a developer. This person has half a million dollars worth of X, while not understanding X.
> (after there's so much prior, "return to sender" art in the world)
That's awesome that you have come up with a solution for this, while the ecosystem hasn't been able to. Could you share your solution?
It's a hard problem to solve in a system that has to A) be decentralized, B) work when less than half the network is trying to screw you and C) prevent double-spending
"return to sender" sounds easy to implement in a centralized system, but it's not that simple for a decentralized one. At least not until you release your solution.
Of course using the intuitive systems setup for the means that one has to trust some random people or companies, instead of going directly to the blockchain. What happened to trustless?
This is something the developer of the contract should explicitly opt into. As others pointed out, if everything a contract did was via explicit methods, rather than transfers, this type of defect would never have been created.