And I also agree about worse is better. To me the most tragic part is that "worse" has become almost as costly as doing "The Right Thing", mostly due to the extreme flexibility and rush to the market from vendors and libraries. Our foundations weren't as sketchy when the concept was invented.
It has definitely gotten much worse. The only thing keeping me sane is hacking solo projects in languages with great tooling. I don't think I can even stomach interviews anymore, let alone the whole application process farce.
I remember doing an interview with systems design using microservices and mentioning at the end "Well I guess that's it but if this was my personal project I would just have a single server and no native cloud bs".
The guy basically answered "Oh, same. I just ask for people to do microservices because that's how the CTO wants".
And I also agree about worse is better. To me the most tragic part is that "worse" has become almost as costly as doing "The Right Thing", mostly due to the extreme flexibility and rush to the market from vendors and libraries. Our foundations weren't as sketchy when the concept was invented.