The software field is still very young, and there's lots of things we haven't explored yet. A great example of this exploration is the ongoing evolution of javascript from simple scripts to SPAs and a universal compile target. It seems like a lot of effort is being wasted (because it is), but it's similar to startups in the economy. Most efforts fail, but enough succeed that we end up in a better position overall.

The field may hit a point where there's an obvious standard way to build things, (e.g. most houses in the US are wood-framed with drywall because it's cheap an durable enough for most use cases), but this won't happen for a long time. We've had thousands of years to figure out how to build houses and roads, but software really only started in the second half of the last century.