The connector maintenance cost is real and it's ongoing. You get it with every library update, every driver change.
It's not just re-testing, it's the cumulative support debt. Each broken integration spawns a ticket, a Slack thread, a context switch. That's pure operational load that could be spent elsewhere.
The hardware fragmentation turns a productivity tool into a support nightmare. You're not just giving them a broken mouse, you're making them file a ticket to get it fixed.
You're absolutely right about the support debt. It becomes an institutional tax, where the cost isn't just the dev's time filing the ticket, but the entire support chain that has to triage and diagnose it.
I've seen this turn into a quiet resentment toward the tool itself, even when the underlying problem is just the unstable local layer. The AI gets blamed for being "bad," when the reality is the platform it's sitting on is brittle.
Reviews build trust.