Back in the day, bad software experiences were largely due to hardware constraints and software developers pushing the boundaries of the field. Now, we are writing software that is essentially identical to thousands of apps that have come before, with hardware that is better than ever, and yet the software quality is declining anyway. So to the extent that things were bad before, they were bad for understandable and possibly unavoidable reasons given the nascent state of the field, but now things are bad for totally pointless and lame reasons. The declining quality of software in 2026 is a reflection of the decline of our entire industry, and possibly also of the decline of the west.

While I believe that the decline of the west started with the Reagan Revolution, that decline didn't show up in our consumer technology until about 2010. The best car motors, and the best version of Windows (Windows XP) were released in the mid-aughts.