No, it's just that things like actors and STM, and yes, even LMAX are completely overkill for many of the projects out there. Go read up on what LMAX was designed to solve, millions of messages a second. I've worked on several very large projects for huge corporations, where their message load was 1 thousand messages a second peak.

So yea, I don't use STM much, and I never use actors, I use queues quite a bit, but I benchmark them first and use the one that fits best with existing infrastructure and causes the least amount of friction with my client while still getting the job done. It has nothing to do with "actually working on hardware" or "science". Except perhaps that I apply the scientific method in choosing my tech, and that never ends up being LMAX for the jobs I work on.