Once upon a time, there was a Twitch extension developer named Matt. Matt worked hard at developing a Twitch extension. He had a script that packaged up his source files into a deployment artifact, which was named with a timestamp and the ID of the git commit it was packaged from. He then uploaded it to Twitch, got through the approvals process, and got the extension live. Hooray! Matt had a live extension! Matt, like any good developer, then proceeded to clean up his deployment artifacts.
Four months later, Matt needed to make an update to the extension. Not to the code itself, but to the configuration in the Twitch dashboard. This required creating a new version of the extension, changing a single checkbox, and resubmitting it. “This should be easy,” thought Matt, “since I can look at the Twitch extension dashboard to see what version of the extension I uploaded before, and make sure I upload the same commit.” Matt was wrong.
For you see, when Matt went to the config page for the current live version of his extension he found that there was no way to view the information about which version of the extension deployment artifact file he had uploaded four months ago. Not realizing this information would be—for no apparent reason—hidden from him, he had neglected to write down the information somewhere else. Since he’d cleaned up his deployment artifacts like a good developer, he could not simply look at the directory where they normally lived and find the last one that way.
Matt was sad. Matt then realized that even though the Twitch extension UI prevented clicking on the “Version Assets” tab, the information might still be there in the DOM, but hidden: so he invoked the ancient spell of Inspectum Elementum, and waded through the DOM to find that, indeed, the information was there; the UI was simply designed to hide it, under the guise of preventing changes to it. Matt wondered loudly, with much profanity, why on earth you would hide the information rather than simply make the form no longer submittable.