Sure, we might sometimes notice the latency and find it vaguely annoying, but we put up with it because modern computing (with all the attendant "complexity" or whatever that makes low-latency hard) enables us to do things that computers of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago were just completely incapable of doing.
And for the people who really do care about low latency, they can usually build something custom that gets them where they want to be -- as Dan Luu points out in his piece.
So much has improved that Blow’s arguments about how much better computers used to be has an air of Old Man Yelling at Clouds to me.
Booting into Workbench off a floppy is fun and all but my current machine boots up so fast now it’s ridiculous.
Or they're using something like the grade book in Canvas, a very popular LMS, and finding that it is in fact slower than GeoCalc on a C-64.
This is a single analysis from a single person, but if you look at empiric data for latency in terminal text input, there is a pretty significant negative trend over time: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
But 20 years ago, starting applications was slow, because spinning-rust hard drives were slow, CPUs were slow, and we didn't have as much RAM. Yes, applications executed fewer instructions to start up, and used less RAM back then, but today I type on a 13" laptop with 64GB of RAM, so much that my OS doesn't know what to do with most of it, to the point where the OS filesystem buffer cache is "only" using up 12GB, and 44GB is just sitting completely unused for anything. Yes, maybe it's absurd that running a desktop environment with a browser (granted, with over a thousand tabs open), some terminal emulator instances, and the one annoying Electron app I can't get rid of, consumes 8GB of RAM, which alone is three orders of magnitude more RAM than I had 20 years ago.
But the bottom line is that I, as a user, just don't need to care about resource utilization. I don't need to close my word processor when I want to play a game or watch a video. Oh, speaking of that -- in 2000, my CPU didn't have the ability to decode DVD-quality MPEG2 video in real time! If I tried, CPU usage would be pegged at 100%, and the video would still stutter and be unwatchable. (I'm not saying that there weren't CPUs in 2000 that could do this, just that mine could not, and I couldn't afford one that could.) Today I can stream 4k video from some storage location tens or hundreds of miles away, and decode it (on GPU or CPU) and play it back on a machine that sits on my lap (the aforementioned 2000-era CPU of course lived in a big tower case).
"Computers were faster 20 years ago" -- yeah, right.
Few apps start up instantly in 2022. Many require a good network connection and/or a half a gigabyte of RAM, for no good reason.
I think you are just paraphrasing his point, so don't take this as a shot in your direction, but anybody who remembers computers 20 years ago being faster either has some serious rose tinted glasses, or was not using computers 20 years ago. They were incredibly buggy and slow. Basic users crashed their Windows boxes often enough that "blue screen of death" was a common phrase (which is to say, we're advanced users here -- we can even get Linux to crash -- but normal computers are pretty good nowadays if you just use them like a normal person).
If they felt faster, that's because we were using a text editors rather than office suites, because we didn't want to wait minutes for an office suite to start up (and then crash). You can still use a text editor and vim at least is still pretty snappy.
Like surely we can all remember the first solid state drives we installed, right? The feeling of not waiting for programs to load was remarkable. Now we're just used to having programs start instantly.
Things are actually quite good, we're just used to it.
I mean, the internet is kind of a mixed bag. Javascript is annoying and everywhere. But on the other hand, remember when Java applets were a thing?