ORMs are great, but sometimes they make things so easy that we're not thinking about what's happening underneath, resulting in hard to track down bugs.
Redesigning an existing application can be a time consuming process, especially for a relatively large application. Performing a redesign behind a feature flag has a lot of benefits.
Preventing spam can be an evolving game of whack-a-mole and what you learn from observing, will drive what and how you block certain behaviors as well as what you monitor.
Writing software is less about doing things the right way or the wrong way and much more about doing things deliberately.
While APIs are relatively easy to build, they're hard to build well.