Yikes, guess my "undercooked" attempts at baking are just following the local trend then.

Man, you nailed it with the homework line. What gets me is that the spreadsheet itself becomes the job, so you end up optimizing for what the sheet can measure instead of what actually made the dumb video funny in the first place. Then the numbers start lying to you too, since a sound that popped last Tuesday is already dead by Friday and you're basically tracking yesterday's weather. I'd bet the 2019 version of you was reading the room better than any trend page ever could, because that gut read was the real skill and the sheet just gave you a way to second guess it.

What was on page 4 that nobody caught it before the client did, did your boss ever make reading the whole thing a rule after that? That 40 percent clause sounds like the kind of thing a vendor hopes you skip right past.