[mardifoufs]

It's mostly about pay too. And yeah some people want more exciting jobs and maybe even outlandish stuff like the ones you listed (regardless of the sarcasm!). Yes at the end of the day most software isn't super exciting, but it doesn't make a tech stack or platform where most of your job prospects would approximate to "working on some run of the mill, mega enterprise or SMB software project" any more attractive for devs.

Especially when even its advocates somehow use that as an "upside". It might very well be for a lot of people! But it's also a massive turn off for others. I have never worked in a startup or big tech, and work on very concrete and critical products yet I'd very much rather work on even outlandish SV stuff (at least the pay is usually great and the job environment could be good!) rather than on some SMB CRUD or some generic backend service. If I don't have a choice I could do it but it's not super enticing.

[mbesto]

For all of the "SV startups" that are working on hard tech problems (new DBs, LLMs, etc.) there are thousands of SV startup CRUD apps.

Most SV tech stacks are romanticized when in reality they are just are all mostly some flavor of a MEAN stack that is building a CRUD. The allure is the lottery payout and a clean slate tech stack, not that the specific tech itself is used.