[Dioxide2119]

> The root cause is probably the incrementalist approach we take to developing software.

I would blame the "unix philosophy" and "worse is better" approaches of the past, but I bet they were more symptomatic than causal, and their equivalents in other digital realms pop up all the time: IBM vs clones, unix wars, protocol wars, at various times its fights between 'official' (described as stuffy) vs 'pragmatic' (described as lax/crappy) definitions of stuff.

I'd hazard a guess that since (for those of us who are young and therefore spew confident sounding incorrect speculation like this comment) we still have so much of the old 'it works, ship it' hacker groups of the 70s in our past, then the overreach of the CASE / UML / XML fever of the late 90s which we have in turn overreacted against by going too far in the 'look its a containerized k8s pod running behind a reverse proxy that runs some react and uses leftpad to graphql your (must always be online) user information record in this headless electron because SHIP IT' direction.

PS: our historical 'its good enough' precedent didn't help, we've been trapped on 'very fast PDP-11s' for decades. Even BWK and the other forerunners of our modern C + unixlike stack weren't able to get us un-stuck from that stack and so plan 9 etc. failed to catch on. The Lindy Effect is a double-edged sword for sure.