> “Singleton” was not a part of my vocabulary until 3 years into my career :/

If you are a more old-school style programmer, you simply use the older term "global variable". :-)

Looking back, I wish it never had been necessary to memorize all those design patterns just to get work done! All OOP has been is a huge distraction and mostly bs. This is me looking back across 30 years of work, so don't just downvote because you love OOP--try thinking about what I'm really saying here. OOP was, to me, an enormous bend in the river that eventually got pinched off and has become a horseshoe lake, destined to dry up and just become a scar on the software engineering landscape. It feels like it was all a big waste of time and someone's money making schemes, tbh.