I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much easier/faster then removing the field and column and validation, yes.

And I wouldn’t want to work with you or Matt. We can behave like adults and I don’t get paid enough to deal with this kind of immaturity.

No reasonable developer, given the requirement “remove this checkbox as required by a court order”, would respond by changing it to “I love pineapple on pizza”. There are so many other things that could be possibly done instead: just remove it, hide it with CSS, change it to a “<input type=hidden />”, or change the text to “please check the box” if it was really so hard to remove. I can’t imagine any lone developer or product manager being so petty that they would risk their job to spite a court order. The checkbox is only there because someone higher up wants it to be there.

Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox is too technically complicated, so let's just change the text instead to something completely nonsensical."

I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).

You can easily verify this wasn't the case by checking archive.is and seeing that the checkbox was removed for a day before the new one was added or checking stories and comments on what happened or looking at the commit history since the repository is open source.

If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.

The WPEngine checkbox was removed late in the week, and replaced with the pineapple question after the weekend.

Developers on WordPress.org have stated that the value was not stored, and still is not stored. Matt also said he didn't care if you checked it or not.

WordPress isn't as legacy as those platforms for whom "too hard to change the functionality, just change the text" is common.

That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?

I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect useful data but an any case storing it as a date would probably solve the issue.

No, the server-visible name has changed.

3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.

To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?

Maybe the engineer was debating a LLM on the merits of pineapple on pizza and didn't clear the context history before requesting a code change.