While I agree with your sentiment, this one is a bad example.

I grew up with the metric system, as did the vast majority of the world. I have an intuition for "meter", "kilograms", "seconds", and so on.

I need to convert to cumbersome stuff like "miles", "inches" or "pounds" only when reading articles written by, you know, inhabitants of that strange, large country over there.

[1] The history is actually more complicated, but let's not get into that.

That doesn't seem very logical at all, that's entirely subjective. I'm fairly certain a top sprinter would easily be able to sprint much further than my (admittedly) unfit self before running out of breath.

The point isn't that the measurement is precise, the point is that it's useful. The unit has an intuitive and tangible meaning in the real world that let's people ballpark. This doesn't mean we should start doing precision work in furlongs but demanding that everyone switch away from measures that are still useful is silly. As long as the measurements are standardized using metric units who cares that you have a funny name for 201.168m?

Metric is great for general use simply because of it's multipliers: (...) 1G = 1,000M = 1,000,000K = 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000m (...)

And also the simple way many units are related as well, like 1L of water having 1kg of mass (yes, with a certain temperature, pressure, yada yada yada)

Another example of a funny name is two-by-four, which - for some typically American reason - is understood not to actually be two inches by four inches...

You do care if you frequently have to convert between all those funny units.

"Better" has to actually "be better ENOUGH" to warrant all of the retooling of existing systems. I've got plenty of clients who would happily run Windows 2003 ("it's paid for") if it weren't for changing standards that aren't compatible (newer TLS, Exchange, etc) and security breaches. They only upgrade because they have to. "E-mail is e-mail" to them.

But if you sell them some magical new technology that promises to meet new features, like tons of data analysis tools and easily graphs and charts in a new version of CRM, they'll happily upgrade.

It's pretty visible in tech that it's not actually the only (or main) reason, especially when you see companies continuously switching from one crappy tool to another. Tech is a fashion-driven industry; companies use what is hot and/or what everyone else is using. Both of those create a positive feedback loop that amplifies brief spikes in popularity (easily exploitable through marketing) beyond any reasonable proportion.

The worst thing is, though, that it kind of makes sense from the POV of management. The more popular something is, the less risk there is in using it, especially when the decisionmaker doesn't have enough knowledge to evaluate the options. Also, the more mainstream a given technology is, the cheaper and easier to replace programmers.

> The metric system

Really? You know that the whole world is on it, right? And that it makes far more sense than whatever nonsense someone came up with before.

(Here's my new conspiracy theory: lack of adoption of IPv6 is caused by SaaS companies colluding to keep people and companies from being able to trivially self-host stuff.)