This reads like someone who wasn't around for the pulseaudio switch. I remember when it was first introduced to Ubuntu: It was actually bad and the complaints were warranted. Audio lag and drops (over wired headphones and speakers of all things, not bluetooth like might be expected), where the only fix available was to switch back to just alsa. Over the following few Ubuntu releases it steadily became more stable and actually useable, hence why the complaints disappeared - there no longer was anything to complain about.
If systemd is also reaching a turning point, it's because either the developers or distro maintainers are finally listening to users. For example, on Ubuntu, the default for KillUserProcesses is now "no", so screen/tmux/etc won't get killed on logout. This was one of the major complaints with systemd for a long time, the developers changing decades-old conventions and pushing it onto everyone, then saying those programs had to change to work with systemd. What's happened instead is systemd is being made to adapt to those conventions, so complaints are slowly going away.
I think there definitely is some tugging towards perfection that has to happen, sure. Some of it is users lives getting better. But I also think there's a huge resistance to change rooted in the human heart, & some people will drag us all down for a vrry long time over anything that doesnt meet their bias, anything remotely uncomfortable, they'll refuse to see good, or they just have negative biases anyways, have already drank enough of the haterade, become witting or unwitting parts of the shouting class mob.
In general, commenting as a medium is a breeding grounds for dissent & doubt. Some because thatcs natural, that a stance attracts the anti-stances, serves as a place for contrast.
There's a lot of general anti stances that can just never ever be dealt with & killed though. That's an issue, imo anstructural one: if someone mentions docker you bet your ass three people will chime in to ask why docker, can we do without docker?
We're finally no longer having to endure the same endless griping about how awful pulseaudio was, we've been through the conversations enough times & know the refutations & enough people enjoy the vastly-more-powerful and user-configurable than all alternatives capabilities it grants. And pipewire iterated & refined, somewhat proving the concept & api was good enough & worthy. Progress eventually shined theough. But other tech still is beset:
BTRFS still attracts wide manners sof casual slander. Systemd feels like it's turning the page, that we're starting to route & rebuff the endless endless tide of complaints & griefing and sometimes there can be peace when systemd gets mentioned somewhere, but there's still a sizable chance any give little systemd mention turns into a slugfest.
Each tech has to endure years & years of it's haters. The haters have more time & energy, & Bullshit Asymmetry Principle makes just asking a short disruptive question blow up into a vast fog of disinformation & nonsense back & forth. Doubt is just, structurally, easy & cheap, & hard to escape from. It's successful memetically in propogating, in confusing, in disuading. The shouting class has a huge advantage. Doers & believers have much harder jobs & their vigilance & it requires careful finess to cut clearly through bullshit without getting too much on yourself.
> I think people are pidgeonholed in their jobs to whatever framework someone picked and they feel powerless to change it and it’s the wrong tool for the job
Yes for sure. The web has heavily undergone heavy industrialization, with jquery & backbone kind of warm up acts, young adult years, then a rapid rapid acceleration of expectations & demands, more formalized tools, more deliberated architectures. People miss the simpler stringing shit together. And there's tons of concerns we've had to start accepting in, as we grow big, as we raise expecations & add developmemt pressures. You point this our yourself:
> Nothing is going to be perfect, and requirements changing means every N years you need to re-evaluate not just the FE, but the architecture and inter-app communication strategy, caching mechanisms, etc etc.
I also think, the web used to be a cross-roads of different languages & technologies. I've always championed & celebrated the rise of JS, but JS uber alles (over all) was never my desire. Even within JS, we're only just starting to see some re-diversification & re-exploration in a an after-React world; we'd really monocultured out & a lot of older princples (url routing, rest) got kind of kicked over, unmooring the platform from it's roots & things that made it hackable & legible. We're both semi-monocultural, but we also dont bundle in all the answers, to the many facets that need to be considered, and there's less other people trying other ways in this mid-industrailizarion phase, fo learn from & pluck easier ways of doing from.