Covered California (the state's medical insurance portal) is serving invalid JSON.
It's JS, not JSON, and even if you turn it into JSON, it's invalid, because they're sending duplicate keys for some reason.

I'm not sure if this is why I can't create my account or just another way in which their site is messed up

and one of the .js files that is failing to load is from a cloud-based AI company.

exactly the people I want to know about my health problems and SSN

yeah they fucked up their react. They marked one question as "required" so you can't submit the form without answering it, but it has no options you can select.
it's firefox. their fucking form doesn't work on firefox
sorry, only californians using a google-powered browser are allowed to have healthcare

hey look it magically works if I switch my UA

I'm sure that's fine

ooh, now it wants to know if I'm one of the four sexes:
male, female, trans: female to male, or trans: male to female.

great job guys, that's not how it works

I like how when they asked my zip code they had a "why do we need to know this?" option.

but not when they're going "hey, are you a trans?"

they also ask for my sex but the internal form name is gender.

THOSE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS

my gender is no, my sex is fuck no.
unless you're a government, in which case it's fuck the police
there we go I fixed it
oh my god. after filling in that sex option, it also asks for:
1. my gender. Options are: M, F, MTF, FTM, NB, Other
2. What my birth certificate said my gender was. They're seriously asking my AGAB.
3. My orientation. Straight, Gay/Lesbian, Bi, Queer, Another, Unknown.

and now I can't finish filling out my form because they need info from another state site that that one is going to be down today from 6pm to 10pm!

it's currently 2am, but apparently it's still broken

HEY GUESS WHAT It's not a time thing at all.

If you reset your password using firefox, it will never work.

I grabbed a chrome-based browser and it worked first try.

it's even weirder: now that I had the correct password saved (since I reset it and stuffed the new password into my password manager), I tried logging in with firefox, just to see what would happen.

Answer: It tells you that your password is wrong, THEN redirects you to a 2FA page a few seconds later

redirecting to the 2fa is what it does when you get your password right. It tells you your password is wrong, then accepts it
and to be clear, this is on a separate california site to the one that was doing the firefox fuckery in the first post. That was the Covered California site, for healthcare. This is the unemployment site. Completely different sites, and they both have fatal Firefox bugs
one of which MYSTERIOUSLY goes away if you change your user agent.

@foone Cynical but pragmatic guess: this is all compatibility hacks... because it was developed as IE-first and they treated _Chrome_ as the weird one

(and of course no one even thought about Firefox)

@acp @foone At some point all the dirty MSIE5 era hacks we used for an internal government website started working on Chromium (i.e. LTR container inside an RTL container to have a table with the scrollbar on the left side), so nobody bat an eye with other browsers.