It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from the big vendors. The reasons are not even usually technical; the bloat is from ads and tracking and more
> I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms.
I'm not sure people are complaining abut search being slow. Most complaints about search is that is lower quality than it used to be.
> VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000.
VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE. There were very good editors back in the day. And VSCode has started showing signs of a decrease in quality.