[Lockal]

> This is exactly what gaslighting is, a trusted person changing your perception

Well, not always. A gaslighting, especially when you are the target of it, will look as something completely inexplicable and without a central point.

Do you remember who you first heard about the wonderful AngularJS from? Personally, I don't. But information about it was pouring in everywhere. At some point, several companies where I worked started massively adopting Angular. In the end it was a complete disaster. A huge amount of code was written, all that code went to the trash because it was unmaintainable and unextensible (although the advertising posters promised otherwise).

Do you remember who you first heard about the wonderful React from? Did somebody told you that there is some magic thing called ShadowDOM and it solves all the problems, even better then Blockchain and ChatGPT does? But many years later it was revealed that actually it does not. Now we all are just slaves of old myths massively produced by Google/Microsoft/Facebook back in the days. That's what gaslighting is all about.

[nonplus]

For sure, I guess I was not attempting to define the bounds of gaslighting (I should have just said I disagreed that it was not gaslighting), and your cases are quite valid examples to call out.

Re AngularJS: Nope, I don't remember who. I feel that the reason I heard about AngularJS so much was because Google saturated the market with meetups, events and funding. It was an intentional choice to brute force market/mindshare.