More discussion should be had if the cascade is even beneficial in the first place.

It's ironic because standard software development practices advocate isolation.

They are thinking of the more common definition of pathological, which is mental disease/disorder. In the computer-related definition, it means failed outcome contrary to what was expected

Yours is a reasonable meaning assuming you meant the computing sense, but the more common understanding of the word would skew towards personal insult the way you used it.

Unfortunately people can't read your mind over the internet and unicode does not convey intent.

The cascade was a mostly mistake except for interesting applications like dark mode, imo. It does not scale easily for large orgs and its original usecases were tailored for balancing user/publisher/content creator presentation concerns. The market has spoken and the content creators rule.