Re: the YouTube thing, that’s an interesting point of comparison too. I can well imagine a younger version of myself looking at all “content production” stuff as quite silly and ephemeral, and of course much of it is.

The irony though is that lots of things more or less in this category still have a longer shelf life than software (or effort you put into technology related stuff in general). A 5 minute journal entry about that day still may serve some purpose even years later, but 5 hours/weeks/years spent on an obsolete platform or now irrelevant problem? Probably not. Even setting aside companies and professional work, bitrot gets really frustrating eventually after you realize that practically everything requires so much care and feeding. I don’t customize things like phones, browsers, or IDEs anymore because I fully expect most of the effort is pointless treadmill where most problems actively resist even semipermanent solutions.

Awareness of this kind of stuff helps some, which is why you see enlightened devs being pretty ruthless about pruning dependencies. Some tech ecosystems are obviously better than others too, but once you see the treadmill you never really unsee it