I would ask a meta-question: why did the author fall into the trap of writing about the rewrite trap? While much of what the article says is true, it talks about a phenomenon that exists mostly in the funhouse mirror of HN and Reddit. People don't actually rewrite so much; in fact, they probably do it less than they should. Yes, there is a "contempt culture" but it almost always comes from the losing side. E.g. Go is not very popular outside the US, but it's hugely popular in America; how popular is it in the US for active development? 33x less than Java [1]. That's still very respectable, but let's not get carried away. Moreover, HN and Reddit are not only terrible at describing the current state of the industry, they're also terrible at predicting trends. While a few of the ideas/language/techniques hyped on such forums do end up successful, the vast majority end up failing. Some of them continue to be hyped on those forums even long after they've failed.

Why do Reddit and HN paint such a distorted image? I have a couple of guesses. For one, by their very nature, they focus on new and unusual things, which is what they're supposed to. This means that by their nature they focus on things people don't actually do. For another, these forums can, at best, represent the content that's actually produced online, and here there is a big bias towards smaller companies -- perhaps because such content is an efficient form of marketing for them -- as well as towards places and industries where producing blog posts featured on HN is a part of the culture, namely startups and SV companies. Even there we see that an SV company like Google, that employs 2000 times as many employees as a startup, does not produce 2000 times the number of technical blog posts. When the content is so skewed towards small organizations, it gives disproportionate representation to the practices of small companies working on small codebases. When those companies grow, they tend to shift their practices and technologies to more established ones that are not as new and not as unusual, and also produce fewer technical blog posts. Similarly, younger, less experienced developers have more time and incentive to publish posts, and so are overrepresented, but as they mature the often realize, like their predecessors, the mistake of their ways, but also produce less online content. The result is that HN and Reddit mostly talk about things that aren't usually done, and overrepresent smaller problems and practices that come from inexperience. That makes them fun to read, but readers shouldn't forget that the genre they're reading is more that of GQ/Vogue than, say, the New York Times.

[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/