TL;DR : Modern rich-text editors (Lexical, Slate, Draft.js with anti-bot guards) reject DOM mutations from outside their internal state machine. This is a feature, not a bug — but it makes legitimate automation pipelines (CDP-driven publish flows, accessibility tools, paste-from-source workflows) unusually painful. Here's what I tried and what actually works. The setup I'm running a 60-day indie iOS dev experiment. Distribution requires posting milestone updates to Reddit r/indiehackers, IndieHackers.com, and Twitter (X). All three use modern rich-text editors with anti-bot defense. Goal: from a single command, populate the title + body + hit Submit. Three platforms, ~5 minutes wall-clock. Reality: 30+ minutes per platform, 60% success rate, and the body usually ends up empty. What's actually happening Lexical (Meta's open-source rich-text editor, which Reddit uses) has its own state model. The visible DOM is a projection of that state, not the source of truth. When you do this: const editor = document .…