I get why they did it, because the player physically holds it, you'd have the wire hanging in midair once you moved beyond the max range if it didn't do this, which would be weird. But I agree its annoying, I'd rather have a hovering midair wire than it snapping back as it currently does. One tip I have is to get near the end of the range, stop and then move your crosshair around the surface you want to place it, the socket will be blue if it's in range and red if it's out of range.

the only other game I've played with wires like this was fallout 4, that let you run around with invalid wires until you got the placement right, but that also means coding the wire to stretch that long for no reason I guess

The way I do it right now is make rough placements from where I stand then go up to the point and fine tune it, then go back and connect it to the final point

I'd prefer it if the wire would just stop you from moving further. That way building and finding the max length would be much easier and less time consuming. If you can't make the corner, you see exactly how much further you have to place the last node. Instead of trying to get where the snapping action occurred and retaking the wire 5 million times because you jumped to high or too far.

oh thats a good idea too