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> The 90s to early 2000s was the golden age of everything because of context. The substance is almost irrelevant.

It is worth considering that this viewpoint is age-dependent.

I feel this way instead about the mid-eighties to the early 90s, and I personally believe that games went rapidly downhill just after Quake, until the mid-2000s casual gaming boom. Everything went 3D and the fun was beaten out of every game concept.

Speaking from a British position, I think your problem with "entertainment" generally is very specifically the manifold outcomes of the US television network syndication model.

US TV companies make too many episodes of everything, because of that model, and that feeds inevitably into a particular story development concept that involves teams of people growing and feeding an addiction.

Not so long ago, a British Prime Minister (David Cameron) told Tina Fey that he wanted a more American model in British TV -- more episodes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48021899

"Come and convince our showrunners that they can't just make six episodes of things. Like you guys, they should make 200 episodes," she recalled him saying.

Fey rejected the request, however, explaining that US writers were, in fact, jealous of the less-is-more British approach.

The way this works -- that everything has to have a spinoff, everything has to have a multi-episode story arc, everything has to have a universe -- is also why cinema is screwed, because it is now a feeder for this system.

So my suggestion is: watch things that don't have more than ten episodes ever. Watch films that don't have sequels. Reject syndication culture.

There's thousands of good indie games now all over Steam and itch.io. This is approximately the first time free game toolchains are good enough to make things that are really good and not just RPGMaker stuff.

In particular I think indie horror games feel well-crafted and original now even if they're cheap. Can't tell you why though.

> Entertainment is too much like drugs

I watched an interview from the 80's-90's in which a developer discusses the process of coming up with a concept for an arcade machine. They said something like "It's like trying to create digital drugs."

> the new generation of programmers looks down on how the world is GUI dependent

I personally think we have a good mix of GUI and terminal apps right now. They both have their uses.

> That's too easy

I feel like making a GUI app is harder precisely because of the added development work.

> Programmers are no longer excited about tech

I'm less enchanted with having to know several frameworks before getting a job, rather than simply understanding a language/paradigm well and being quickly onboarded, but that's probably just a sign that I personally shouldn't be a software developer.

I definitely think GUI development is easier, because there's often no algorithms or math work.

I've never sorted or btreed or third normal formed or a* searched something. I've never designed a new machine learning model. I couldn't implement even a toy version of AES. I've never done a GPU shader.

I just find out who has, come up with a workflow model and UI that uses it, then track down all the edge cases that need a few if statements to handle, and maybe pack and unpack some bytes for a microcontroller.

I couldn't quite be replaced by a CRUD builder tool, because I'm doing embedded stuff, and a lot of CSS theming work... but it's not unimaginable.

You’re so right! Tech has become a job! It takes so much time to build something without bugs and with correct error management, that a new exciting feature is just yet-another-project.

And every new NPM dependency feels like installing a Russian hacker’s “free library” on my computer.

It kinda makes me wish I had dedicated web dev experience. Web seems to be a lot more excited about features, much less interested in DIYing algorithms, very reuse friendly, and generally positive about tech, preferring a nonprivate app over no app at all, etc.

They still take security seriously, but not to the point of avoiding widely trusted dependencies or trying to push back on tech in general and use more analog things

From a back-end position, front-end seems more enjoyable. Then from front-end, everyone still wants to move to be a designer ;)

I have to admit that, after starting my own product, I’ve found my thing (doing features with a bit of backend and a bit of product management…).