I'm thinking you may not have made it all the way to this part of the article when you were reading it, but here's the rest of the context

> Don't do this to me. I get to copy paste whatever I want whenever I want. When you get your own browser you can do whatever you want but while you are living in my house under my rules I get to copy/paste whenever I goddamn feel like it.

Forcing the user to type the password manually rather than letting them paste something in. I think the original idea was to not allow them to mistype the first one, then paste the typo in the second field. But it's a dated practice and very annoying.

I once worked on a project for a Pharma company and this one guy tried very hard to push his password requirements and no pasting stuff, but luckily we convinced someone with final say that we should just follow the NIST guidelines for password reqs and leave the UX of the password field up to the UX people lol.

I do agree though that smooth scrolling was a front end developer offense, luckily it went out of style pretty quickly.

> the original idea was to not allow them to mistype the first one, then paste the typo in the second field.

correct. the other analysis here is wrong. we see similar for payments where user is not allowed to paste in ACH info.

but this isn’t exactly about user error per se. this is about support cost for bad entries. if the user types a wrong password during registration the recovery of such is very hard. the common user (even of a product like fusion) is VERY unsophisticated and will have severe problems recovering. the more advanced user will have plugins that disable paste disabling. the middle skill user (like in the post) will get past it on their own.

so net net this is just another case of this is why we can’t have nice things. they “have to” address that bottom (skill) level of users.

personally i can excuse this. the rest, not so much!