Do you think doctors in training get to do open heart surgeries by themselves fresh out of university? Do you think we train aviators that can only fly using the autopilot? Because that's the way we treat software developers. This has nothing to do with elitism and everything with professionalism. Our industry has built training wheels in form of various VMs and high level languages because it missed the opportunity to properly train its workforce.
You keep going to the "OH MY GOD, PEOPLE WOULD DIE" examples to try and make a fairly weak point.
No one is going to die, because some noob made a crappy little site out of the millions of crappy little sites, and it's not performing like a demi-god.
VMs and high level languages aren't "training wheels". Especially not VMs, that's just complete and utter non-sense. Unless you think literally every website on the web should have a 100% dedicated server box.
VMs are good for a great many of things, both noob-friendly and not.
As for high level languages, they were meant for one particular thing. To get a task done quickly. Which is largely the real reason why so much software out in the wild performs like crap.
Anyone can sit down and spend years making a highly performant piece of software. But when things have to move fast, corners get cut & there's not enough time dedicated to researching to get said product to be as highly performant.
No I don’t think people die (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case). I just don’t want to have to buy a 3000$ PC so I can run a fucking chat app, an editor and a browser somewhat decently. The opportunity cost of bad software is paid by billions of users every day.
By the way, my language VM is your language runtime.