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I think you're somewhat right, but it's not the whole story. There's another pipeline that goes something like:

1. Technical software problems are more fun than difficult product problems

2. Programmers would rather solve fun problems

3. Programmers end up creating technically elaborate machines to solve simple (buy annoying) product problems

As an ex-member of a team who used react, redux, typescript, observables, epics, thunks, custom hoome-grown validation libraries, websockets and elixir deployed in two different microservices to build a... signup wizard... I can confirm this.

I proposed to build it in Rails (which we already had, but was the "old monolith we're migrating away from") and I almost get crucified.

That's a story I'm familiar with, but I am not actually aware of any (major, commonly used) tools that were created out of boredom. I only see instances of people using existing tools when they are not necessary out of boredom.

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