That's not the dynamic.

It's people that think electric motors are always the right solution to every problem and it's only a matter of rube Goldberging it up to shoehorn electric motors in to places that that's better without them.

It's against arrogant dogmatic rose colored glasses fanboyism being mistaken for software engineering

And this isn't straw-manning, the internet is full of these evangelists that exist as effectively marketing arms, as if they're bicycling around wearing nametags on behalf of the Church of Current Day Frameworks.

All it does is create messy piles of tangled garbage that wastes people's times and gets thrown away to be rewritten when the next flashy thing comes around. It's hot fashion for programming

It's gross and needs to stop. Seriously. Let's build the future, help fix the world's problems and quit fucking around.

This fetishism for shiny things have left us impotent executioners of meaningful change and thus we are amidst the tech stagnation

The way it played out with jQuery is that there was a transition period; gradually more and more classes of app didn't need to be built with jQuery and it was easier to build them without it.

The implication was that we're in a transition like that presently.

The steam engines will continue to run on coal after the natural gas to the power plant is shut off and the power stops working for the electric trains

If an electric engine makes your vehicle noticeably slower and heavier, there's a reason to keep using a steam engine.

Or maybe it’s more like saying ICEs will be a ghost one day? EVs were once the path not taken…

I said no such thing.

You implied it. What you should have alluded to is that it is necessary to use technologies today that won’t necessarily be in use in the future, merely as a stepping stone to get us to the next destination, where we will use a new but still temporary technology.

As Scott Adams says, "Analogies are for fighting." If you try to counter a statement with an analogy you almost always simply get a fight.

Quoting absolutes expressed by highly opinionated people is also for fighting. Not saying you shouldn’t, but maybe there’s some nuance missing. Not even saying the particular analogy was devoid of conflict, it has plenty of room for disagreement. But it didn’t feel to me like it was inviting any which wasn’t already present.

I would classify Scott Adam's statement as a trueism -- true for most people, under most circumstances, for most times. Unfortunately, couching a trueism in its most precise linguistic form with associated probabilities and error margins is a path to simply being ignored. Once a thread switches to rhetoric, dialectic responses are like pissing in the wind, forgive the analogy :-)

Well I’ll give you this: quoting Scott Adams then correctly using and understanding the word dialectic is definitely not on my HN comment threads bingo card.

Surely it's the countering bit that shows you want to get in to a fight more than the analogy. Analogies are just a way of illustrating a point.

I do wish that people would engage in dialectic conversation when they encounter an analogy, rather than rhetoric. Unfortunately, I find Scott Adam's words ring true.

Never thought about that, where do you get this from? But it kinda rings true for me in life.

I heard it from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. In addition to writing that comic he is a very interesting thinker. He is also a trained hypnotist.

I think op was suggesting someday we’d be on hoverboard or something

We're all gonna be debugging wordpress apps in the metaverse while our self-driving cars whisk us down the freeway.