This kind of "shoddy craftsmanship" has been the accepted way to produce software for a very long time, and the effects have until recently been hidden by Moore's Law. Wasted resources didn't matter because everyone with money to spend would throw away their old machines and buy new, faster ones. People working at the extremes -- data centers and mobile phones -- have to actually think about resource use; maybe this will make its way toward the center.

I'm not sure. On older machines it was more obvious where shoddy craftsmanship was as you had less resources to use. Now it is hidden a bit more but I never ever accepted it as the "accepted way" to produce software.

Others might have, but I don't think it was ever encouraged to write daft loops or short timers to write data.

It is interesting that the styles of writing code (eg doing dynamic casts at runtime a lot) has real impacts on performance and speed. Stroustrup wrote an interesting paper (must find it) where he encouraged static code generation rather than runtime dynamic checks all the time. It means we have to think a bit harder when designing software and writing it, but it is worth it for all our sakes (less CPU time to do the same thing, less power used etc)

I hope you don't work for an online publisher/advertiser. The amount of waste their software generates is absolutely staggering.