Caching Memes

You know that one senior dev who shows up to the system design interview with a conspiracy theorist's wall of chaos? Red strings connecting random boxes, sticky notes everywhere, and somehow they're convinced their architecture that hits the database 47 times per page load is "fine actually." Meanwhile they're out here explaining why caching is "premature optimization" while their API response times are measured in geological epochs. Sure buddy, let's just query that unindexed table with 50 million rows on every request. What could go wrong? The confidence-to-competence ratio here is absolutely off the charts. They've got the energy of someone who's never been paged at 2 AM because Redis went down and suddenly realized why everyone kept saying "just cache it."