Instagram doesn't make any provisions available for me to make the type of customizations that I do in this extension. As a result, I need to look at their code and write new custom code to augment their current code. But Instagram is a modern tech company which likes to make very frequent changes to constantly improve their product (which is a good thing) but it causes their website code to change very often, and sometimes their changes end up breaking the extension.
Because I don't work for Instagram, I don't have any way to know in advance when they're about to make changes, nor do I know what the changes will be, so all I can really do is hope that I notice if the extension is suddenly broken, and then react and fix it ASAP. Often, I'm not even the person to notice that the extension is broken: a user such as yourself sometimes notices and then reports it to me via the "Support" tab in the Chrome Web Store, or they just email me.
Lately a big source of trouble causing the extension to break is "A/B Testing". This is where Instagram experiments with new features/changes, but initially gives the new feature to only a small fraction of their users. This allows them to see how users like a new feature, as well as find bugs associated with it, before they roll the new feature out to everyone. They seem to assign new features on an account level basis, but randomly. So for example, if you have 2 accounts, you may notice their website looks or behaves slightly differently depending on which account you log in with because they may only mark one of your accounts to be in the "test new feature #123 group", while your other account is in "test new feature #567 group", or in no test group at all. And btw, often these "new features" are minor code changes, and you may not even be able to visually see any difference when using their website.
And they may have a few different new features in progress at a given time, which means there's a few different versions of their website. Sometimes some of these new features break the extension. This happened a lot recently starting in Nov 2022 - users started complaining that the extension was broken in certain ways, but the extension was working fine for me with the few instagram accounts I have, making me unable to reproduce the bugs they were experiencing. Basically, none of my accounts were in the new feature test groups that was causing problems for some users.
This is a tough situation. I need to be able to personally use the new feature in order to make the extension compatible with it. All I can really do is try to create more accounts, hoping a new account will get lucky and the random number generator will assign me to the feature test group. Or I can just wait and hope that as days pass, one of my accounts will eventually receive the new feature due to them giving the feature to more and more users, or as they eventually roll the feature out to everyone, allowing me to reproduce the bug and fix it.
But lately Instagram has made it difficult to create new accounts. Instagram gets a lot of bots trying to make accounts, and so they carefully scrutinize new accounts and look for signs of being a bot. They usually ban my account immediately unless I give them a phone number to prove I'm a human, which costs me time and money to keep getting additional phone numbers purely for the sake of creating more temporary Instagram accounts. This is a free extension, and I really mean it when I say I don't sell your data, so I don't make any money from this extension at all. As a result, I hope you can understand that there's only so much time and effort I will put into fixing things when they break.