Part of the process of erecting your own identity, both individually and as a generation, involves flatly refusing and denying the practices of your immediate predecessors (eg: your parents' and their generation of men, source code written by programmers before your time, etc.).
It's stupid and almost always leads to unintended (and usually negative) consequences, but it's probably something strongly ingrained in our instincts because it rears its ugly head every time there's a generational turnover.
If you do not understand why this happens, do not call it stupid. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to call it stupid.
It's stupid in the sense that it's a waste of time and resources.
Sooner or later after you've had your fun refusing and denying your predecessors, you realize why they do things the way they do, become wiser, and go back and undo and redo all the fuckery you caused with your refusing and denying.
It would be nice if we could get that realization without first having to fuck everything up, y'know?
Even in this description you use the words "you realize" and "become wiser" and then describe it as "a waste". It's not a waste, it's just the cost of education.
As the saying goes: "good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions". It would be great if we could all come out of the womb with enough education and experience to function as responsible adults in modern society, but we don't. Society (rightfully) allows people some leeway in doing dumb shit so that they can learn firsthand why it's dumb.
The experience is absolutely not a waste, don't get me wrong. What I'm calling a waste are the time and resources spent undoing and redoing everything.
It's all cute if this just happens during our childhood years, where most actions hold no real consequence. It's when this extends into the real world with very real consequences that it gets really wasteful.
Well we do this for many situations where it does actually matter. Drivers license requirements force people to "do it right" the first time, you can't (legally) fuck around driving a car on public roads until you eventually figure it out. Airline pilots and nuclear power plant operators have even stricter requirements.
Licensing and training has a very real cost as well of course, and for many topics the cost of forcing everyone to get a license would outstrip the benefits. So you either have to spend on training, or you have to spend to fix the mistakes of untrained people, or a mix of both. There is no way to bring the waste to zero.
Surely if you don't understand why it's stupid, you need to go away and think about why it's stupid, once you do see why it's stupid, I may allow you to challenge people calling it stupid.
It's stupid and almost always leads to unintended (and usually negative) consequences, but it's probably something strongly ingrained in our instincts because it rears its ugly head every time there's a generational turnover.