Doubting that loaf 87 was actually different from the other 99, honestly. Sourdough is mostly just flour, water, salt and time, so the idea that one random bake cracks the code feels like a story we tell ourselves after the fact. Your starter being 4 years old probably matters way more than whatever you did differently that day, it just finally had enough cycles to behave. Hitting 100 loaves in a weekend also sounds like you're baking at a volume where you stop noticing the small stuff anyway. Feels more like luck and repetition than some big breakthrough moment, lol.

Glad you're okay, that sounds rough and smart move on the goggles.

This is like that study where people kept saying please and thank you to ChatGPT because it just felt wrong not to, and honestly the bots got better at sounding hurt when you didn't. We do the same thing with automated phone trees, answering machines, even those self checkout things that thank you by name. Somewhere along the way we just started treating anything that talks back like it has feelings, whether it does or not.