Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies.
The cycles cycle on.
Like the new frontend frameworks coming every week after 2010 sometime. Not jumping on every single one, and waiting until react was declared the winner and learn that worked well. Sure, someone that used it from day 1 had more experience, but one quickly catch up.
Only thing that stuck thus far is the cloud. Though not for infinite scalability and resiliency, cause that just dumps big invoices in your lap.
The Cloud happened as well, as you've pointed out
AI adoption is well past Quantum and Web 3. Comparing it to those two is nonsensical.
All those listed and more, are part of the cycles that the parent comment mentioned and which I've continued.
Same thing with Agile. Mostly sprint-based waterfall, iterative development is not something I've ever seen in practice. Or people over processes, remember those ideas?
BigData, was another hype cycle where even smaller companies wanted a "piece of the action". I've worked at the time in a sub 50 developers company, and the higher ups where all about big data. When in fact our system was struggling with GBs of data due to frugality in hardware.
For a moment in time you couldn't spit in any direction without hiting a Domain Driven Design talk. And now we disable safeguards and LLMs write a mix of garbled ideas from across all the laundered open source training data.
Too early to tell where AI will land, and if it will bring down the economy with it, but spending rate doesn't deliver equal results for all, and we will have to see after the dust settles.