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I'm genuinely surprised and more than a little shocked and concerned that there are developers out there who are unfamiliar with state machines and their use. I think of state machines as being foundational knowledge, like sorting algorithms, b-trees, etc.

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I’d argue they’re more foundational.

If some code could use a b-tree but the dev doesn’t know about them, they can’t do much damage — they’ll use a less optimal tree.

If some code needs a state machine but the dev doesn’t know about them, that code will have so many bugs.

I fully agree! When designing solving a problem it great to take a step back and think through the states you can end up in. Although it is easy to make the machine overly complex when you have "multi-dimensional" states unless to are a little bit carful with how you model it.

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