We’ve built a towering pile of shite
I see this argument a lot: in the "good old days" there was Unix and apt and it was brilliant, now we have hundreds of toolsets and libraries that are flaky and need updating every year.<p>I think what these arguments miss is the upside of today. The "good old days" of brilliant developer experience was only brilliant for a small number of people. You had to learn right way of thinking,  invest the right amount of time to learn good principles, how Linux was architectured, how not to re-invent the wheel, and so on.<p>This was a huge barrier to many people getting started with coding and the economics demanded getting more new developers ramped up faster. This pressure caused people to try to quickly develop little "get started quick" ecosystems.<p>Now we are in a situation where from a pure software engineering perspective we do have a complicated stack of teetering and shifting frameworks, I agree. But on the other hand this has come with enabling an awful lot more people to <i>quickly</i> get started toying with apps and coding.<p>What I'm trying to say is, these days its quicker to go from Level Zero to Level One, even if that means you've shot yourself in the foot going from Level One to Level Two.