I agree. There is a lot of accumulated bloat and a lot of newly accreted bloat from the tools built to accelerate on the recent trends.

It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.

A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.