cold take speculation: the architecture astronautics of the Java era probably destroyed a lot of the desire for better abstractions and thinking over copy-pasting, minimalism and open standards

hot take speculation: we base a lot of our work on open source software and libraries, but a lot of that software is cheaply made, or made for the needs of a company that happens to open-source it. the pull of the low-quality "standardized" open source foundations is preventing further progress.