when handcoding my website i very specifically went and put terminating slashes on all the self-closing tags and then a week later read it's actively discouraged to do that and very specifically went and took them all back out. html is SO cool. it's like all the sludge and weird technical debt of the rest of tech, but objectively so much less evil
oh damn i gotta go edit some posts
(jk eh it's not worth it but good to know for the future)
i also just learned about this today. stack overflow sez apparently most modern parsers will just strip out the slash and it ends up being just <br> underlyingly no matter which one you write, so i guess there's no real reason to put it unless you want your stuff to work with old browsers