alt Hacker News> The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is
Nobody, except your future employment prospects.
There's good reasons and bad reasons for a lot of technical options; "can I hire people to do it?" is a very good reason, but it does directly lead to CV-driven-development, where we all chase whatever tech stack the people writing the job adverts have decided is good.
The same people who capitalise "MAC" in "MAC & PC", the same people who conflate Java with JavaScript, the same people who want 10 years experience in things only released 3 years ago.
Right, and there's the rub, and what's behind all these changes - coordination. We containerized to coordinate our ability to use lots of different runtime environments. We typescript'd and python'd the web stack so that our frontend and our data friends could feel at home in the backend. We created ever-more-elaborate package repositories to make layering increasingly complex software projects simpler.
I think what people who write essays like this wish for is the smaller scale of things. Industrial steel production is objectively better than old-timey blacksmithing, but hammering out sets of cutlery certainly feels a lot more personal. Steelmaking wasn't better before all these fancy mechanisms and danger and pollutants and logistics, but when it was craft, it was more satisfying to work on.