I see so much growth & positivity, so much can-do-ism. Everyone's doing great things, but in particular the web has brought about a much higher access to systems that seem much safer for users, much more sandboxed, with better tools/extensions/navigability/accessibility/hackability, that have much more open source activity going on than native (which has been to huge benefit in so many ways: to productivity, to learning, to exploring, to having fun, to creating social cultures & groups).
> I think that we're in a downwards spiral at this point
I'm mainly writing a reply just to say: I have huge hope we're on an great upward ascent & have made things increasingly better.
> IMO, the reason is, to a large degree, ineptness of software engineers.
I sometimes encounter less than optimal code or solutions, but the amount of times that it matters is unbelievably little. Focusing on really good engineers making really excellent decisions is, not, to me, a critical issue in most places. I think there's a lot of value in just finding the budget to support open source engineers, in trying to support good community efforts, like Web Incubation specs, like Bytecode Alliance. Time & care, about doing good things for community, over time, is the incomparable advantage, is the prime requirement of turning acceptable/passable/maybe-a-little-defect-y code into something that really works well & serves & is/has-become enduring.
> Instead, the industry as a whole hands out more "productive" tools, i.e., the abstraction layers you mentioned,
I see so little harm to using the good, well embraced, ultra productive, mid-industrial toolset we've grown into. And I see so little benefit to trying to go any other way. We should respect resource consumption, and some apps (webapp and native both) do bad jobs, but the layers mentioned seem like a vanish point of concern, far far far down where I think computing needs to be dwelling & caring & trying to do better. There's so few examples that there are real gains to be made from abandoning the layers we have; efforts like react-native show we can do basically the same high-production technioques at a native layer, but the rewards for doing it native have almost never materialized; just using the web stack continues to be good.
I think there are far more productive things to be debating & discussing, as we decide where to orient ourselves & the next steps of computing to. Worrying about these stacks has infected too much of the online discourse time spent, has become a mind-virus.