Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally intense adverts I then waste cycles blocking?
Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.
That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for.
Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.
Perhaps a circular process. Not a circular argument. It's just reality that users reward optimization they can't really notice less than features. In places where it does matter to the bottom line, like how fast a shopping page loads, the optimization is prioritized.
But the cost to the user is not considered, even in the real world. For example, transportation decisions are made in the airline industry, and they rarely consider how much this will financially impact the lives of passengers. The same pattern is replicated everywhere: companies work to maximize their profits, while their clients have to deal with possible financial losses.
Desktop OS's are not appreciably faster now than they were 30 years ago, despite exponential rises in memory, storage and processor capacity. Better looking, yes, but not faster.
Games have maintained roughly the same performance for 20 years. However, the number of polygons has risen exponentially.
There's a minimum acceptable performance for most systems. If you exceed that, no-one cares (the extra performance is wasted). So every system hits that minimum performance level and spends the rest of the budget on appearance (or configurability, or ease of editing, or whatever).
Wordpress is slower than flat HTML. But the average web browser and connection is fast enough to serve Wordpress content in an acceptable time for the user. The "extra" budget was spent on making it easier to create the content.
> Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things.
The only time a decision maker actually cares about the cost to the user is when they are trying to calculate how much money (or savings) they could capture from the user.
