That 5 minute pause is doing REAL work, and I read something last year about how our brains handle being attacked online, basically the rage part fires way faster than the part that can think straight. The writer said waiting even a couple minutes lets the thinking part catch up, which sounds like exactly what happened to you. I got dragged once for a comment I made about a school board thing and I did the opposite, fired back in like 30 seconds, and it just made everything worse for two days. What sticks with me is that your calm reply with a source did more than a hundred hot takes would have. People online mostly just want to know you actually heard them. The hard part is that 5 minutes feels like 5 hours when your phone is blowing up.

Funny thing is I learned this the hard way too, except my version involved printing out a 400 line file and spreading it across the kitchen table like I was doing taxes. My husband walked by and asked if I was writing a novel, and honestly the outline of my nested if statements looked like a bad poem. Writing it by hand forces your brain to slow down, which is the whole point, since on a screen your eyes just skip over the bug like it's invisible. My spiral notebook is full of arrows pointing to the wrong variable now, and it works better than any debugger I have tried.