> ...there is no escaping that the entire dot-com era was a disaster for IT/CS in general and for software quality and Unix in particular.
The dotcom era was almost 20 years ago. The Netscape IPO (1995) is now closer to the IBM PC (1981) than it is to 2017. Yes, a lot of terrible engineering happened during the dotcom boom, and most of it was proprietary code running on old-school Unix servers.
If anything, Linux was a pretty solid alternative in those days. Sure, the GUI was a bad joke, and driver support was hit or miss. But if you chose your server hardware well, then Linux would give you years of uptime. Windows fell over several times a week. (Microsoft didn't get truly serious about quality and security until sometime around XP SP2, when they finally got sick of malware and buggy drivers.)
So in 2017, what does a "bazaar"-style project look like?
One modern example of a "bazaar" is Rust. (If you dislike Rust, you can insert plenty of other examples here.) All major design decisions are made through RFCs, after community feedback. There's no benevolent dictator, but rather a core team. Several key libraries like "serde" are actually maintained by separate teams. The compiler is released every 6 weeks. And yet, I have absolutely zero complaints about Rust's QA. There are plenty of test suites, and no code gets merged to master until those tests pass. To prevent regressions, somebody downloads all public Rust packages from crates.io, compiles them, runs their test suites, and checks for regressions. And so at work, we can upgrade our Rust compilers without fear.
Now, to be fair, Rust is not for everybody. Not everybody wants "a better C++ minus the foot guns," or enjoys references and generic types. But if you do want those things, Rust is a good example of a community-driven project which delivers reliable, well-designed software.
And I could point out 20 more modern open source projects with solid design and solid QA. We know how to do this now.
And those inexperienced dotcom-era graduates now have houses in the suburbs. They're planning how to pay for their kids' college educations, and more than a few of them have some grey hair.