Solid post, but complaining is easy. Programmers have complained about slow software, excessive complexity and abstraction for almost the whole history of computing.

What are some non-toy examples of people doing it right? What are concrete steps we can take to write cleaner, faster software?

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I think HN itself is a pretty inspirational example. It's one of v few sites that always loads fast, even on a bad network. It has zero ads, zero trackers, and very little fluff.

So what does HN put significant effort into? Moderation, tools for moderation, algorithms to detect spam and brigading, etc. So one concrete suggestion is to focus your engineering effort and your hiring "below the waterline". The best software is often minimalist, with lots of thought and effort invested below the surface. A classic example is the original google.com: just two buttons and a text box.

Much bloat comes from teams that only know how to think about the part of the software they can see.