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.