I am in 100% agreement. The best tools have enough power and flexibility built-in that they end up serving use cases that the authors never dreamed of. Meanwhile, these days when developers attempt to write a piece of software that's everything to everyone, they only end up satisfying the most basic possible use cases because anything more would cause distraction and/or intimidate the users away from their product. Those who want to actually harness the power of what's possible with software are left out.

If Vim and Emacs were released as new projects today, most of HN would roll their eyes and complain that neither is "opinionated" or "minimal" enough to rely on for serious work, and let's not even get started on the lack of built-in GPU accelerated text rendering...

"("using the API of local services" seems to be an ongoing theme, one of my favourite things is to use secret undocumented APIs where you need to copy your cookies out of the browser to get access to them)"

The aboove is from another submission's comment thread currently on HN front page.^1 Not everything can be done satisfactorily within the browser. Other (smaller) programs are useful. In the later case, the programs are not supported by online advertising.

1. https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/

I do something similar. I have a "hardened" main browser for my serious stuff and everyday browsing needs, and I have a Chromium+uBlock install, which I mainly use in Incognito mode, for sites that break in the "hardened" configuration.