IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
While building this, we've had to do a lot of debugging. You think "Hey, this is a pretty simple request, why did it fail?" Then you actually dig into the archive that is 98 files of HTML, JS, and CSS, inlined and minified with obscure variable names and no comments. Thankfully many sites do still have relatively stable selectors + aria labels, but I am honestly amazed everyday at how well some of this stuff manages to works.
And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.
For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.
Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.
While I agree the word could be appropriate, I'm asking a meta question about how it is typically used, and whether or not we're conveying something unintentional by using it in this context as well. I don't consider "variants" a good thing because I lived through a few years of COVID.
Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but
I discovered this back in 2015 (by the version history) and put together a "one sheet" (two sided) version of the rules. The side with the card effects is especially useful.
