> Just on your last paragraph, I think it started that way. That Firebase would be the competent general problem solver that you might need to break out of. Firebase and App Engine have tended to weaken over time, so that you needed to move to GCP more often. Ideally Firebase would get more powerful, cover more cases, and have higher quota limits. Instead it feels like they are being degraded or abandoned rather than embraced.

I think I mentioned this on another thread, but the "weakening" you mention is "strengthening integrations with other parts of the platform." I think the general thought here is that an App Engine or a Firebase is a local maximum, and in exchange for trading off deeper integration, there is a platform wide global maximum that is achievable.

Pre-acquisition Heroku, GitHub, Firebase, etc. all were able to achieve local maxima, which led to acquisition, and subsequent attempts to globally optimize.

Dev tools is a brutal business: if you're lucky, 80% of your customers cost you money, 15% break even, and 5% are where 80-90% of your revenue comes from. A better DX typically only gets you more customers in the bottom 95% bracket, because it's easier to onboard people who can get from 0 to 1 than from 10 to 100 (or 100 to 1000). Deeper integrations into the features on the far side of the curve tend to get prioritized and look a lot like what folks here are discussing as negatives.

> I've never gotten the impression that at google DX was lionized. Examples of doing this well culturally are pre-Salesforce Heroku, Github, vscode, and Stripe.

It's not, for the reasons others have pointed out about people being smart enough to figure out the solution regardless of the DX, etc.