I'm pretty sure that most people are only dimly aware of the existence of the quoted part at the bottom of an email. Mail clients routinely hide it by default, and in most cases it's never needed for anything in today's email conventions. Most clients now group conversations to threads, and most emails aren't long or complex enough to require much context anyway, never mind the custom of interleaving quotes and replies.

The vast majority people didn't yet use email back when bottom posting was good etiquette and top posting was discouraged. They're simply not aware of the concepts, or the controversy, at all. Even old-fashioned snail mail letters, for those who still remember such things, didn't usually include quoted passages, even though getting a reply to one's letter could easily take weeks if not months.

I bottom-post if the other person do so first. That almost never happens these days. I guess if too many do it like that then no one will be the first to bottom-post, even when both would prefer that. Not sure what a good solution would be that did not involve confusing random other people with bottom-posts.

I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.

Same. I tried really hard to quote properly, because I was so annoyed by the top-posting mess that everyone else did, and it frustrated me that people would add you to an email where you need to read 100 things that came before it (with increasingly garbled formatting) to understand what was going on.

I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context."

I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.

True. Once a coworker asked me why I was responding with an empty mail since my reply was at the bottom, and he didn't bother to scroll down. Since then, I gave up and just started using conventions everyone else is using. The goal is not purity, but clarity of communications.

I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.

I think our contexts are all different. But, to share a different experience, as an academic (with plenty of conversations involving people in industry as well each year) I have used interleaved and bottom-posting for decades and it causes confusion maybe once a year at most and mostly because Microsoft's online client is broken and at times does not even render anything below "Dear Foo," in the HTML view (got to give this small start up in Redmond some more time though, we can not expect them to implement standards that have only been around for over 40 years).

Wonder if there's a way to make the popular email clients (outlook/gmail) re-sort conversation view so that the newest reply is at the bottom.

then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.