You're a user of jq in the sense of the comment you're replying to, not a developer. The developer is the developer _of jq_, not developers in general.
Yes, that's exactly how I meant it. I might _rarely_ peruse some code if I'm really curious about it, but by and large I just trust the developers of the software I use and don't really care how it works. I care about what it does.
That’s where accountability comes in. It should be possible to have a non empty set of people that understand all the code. If I choose a dep to do unicode string parsing, that means I trust the author have good knowledge about unicode string parsing. And they should have the skills to maintain their code even if what I got is bytecoded or compiled.
What do you mean, you can't quote the Linux kernel by heart? I thought it was gospel for all nerds:
Loongarch kernel, first paragraph, the lord Linus said, in all his wisdom:
/* Hardware capabilities */
unsigned int elf_hwcap __read_mostly
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(elf_hwcap)