As mentioned in another comment, support shouldn't be entirely disconnected.
If a customer seems to have discovered a legit bug in the software, there needs to be a path from support to engineering for the bug to get reported.
At the very least, support staff should be willing and able to attempt to recreate a bug that a user is reporting, rather than asking them to completely wipe their device and install everything from scratch for something that is easily reproduced.
Let's take a very simple example. Imagine you've got this Chess app, and whenever someone creates a checkmate involving two bishops, the game crashes, 100% of the time, but only in cases involving two bishops. Sure, maybe the first ticket you get, you go through the workflow of reinstalling, etc. But by the time you've got 100 tickets all saying their game crashed on a checkmate involving two bishops, that should have been escalated to engineering. At the very least, support should be saying it's a known issue. Honesty is going to be a lot less frustrating than to be told to take steps that both sides knows won't fix the issue.
While I see nothing particularly egregious about Kitty's maintainer, other than being a bit of a dick, it's not really the job of a maintainer to be your pal.
Except, when I started using WezTerm at the start of this year... omg, this guy is absolutely fantastic.
I have read scores of his posts and he's struck the perfect tone in every single one. Love this guy, really, he's awesome.
Not at all. Yak shaving is getting caught up in all the surrounding, sometimes supporting tasks, so you never get to the main task.
Yak shaving is spending time finding the ultimate editor, choosing between syntax highlighters and schemes, configuring git, et c., so you never actually get around to write any code. That is different from wrenching the last nanosecond of optimisation from some not particularly central part of the code.
It's not yak shaving. Yak shaving is (possibly) recursive explosion of seemingly unrelated tasks which are required to complete the original task. The comment fits description of a maladaptive perfectionism.
No? I have an Edo-era plate I bought from an antique store in Japan which I then gave to my mother. Did I steal it from Japan? If someone did the same thing 200 years ago then put it in a British museum is it a stolen item? Is my mother in possession of stolen goods?
Yes.
Unless you want to drive engineering insane / waste a ton of money.