Is the madness ever going to end?

No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You could have each developer or team manager their own stack, and thus get microservices. But now you have just pushed your complexity from a single monolithic app to the space between all the individual apps.

At the end of the day, naked tech has no value. It's only the end-user features that make money. The industry has optimized for this, and that is what gives rise to all these seemingly insane practices. They aren't great from a pure tech perspective, but they help speed up feature development.

Paradoxically, the community still values naked tech much higher than end-user features. That is why the community heroes are those who write kernels and frameworks. So you have a million developers all trying to "make it big" with their bespoke framework. 99% of these go no where, but even that 1% that gain some traction just add to the constant churn of `inventing "revolutionary new ways" of doing the exact same thing.`

That's an interesting and valuable perspective. I'm definitely one of the people who keep reinventing things that have already been done before, even though I'm not very good. But since I don't use programming to put food on the table, maybe that's okay - it's more of a hobby/educational endeavor than anything important.

All the same, maybe if I spent less time writing, e.g., yet another dictionary/map, I could actually make something worthwhile.

That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked?

Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

The piece is kinda whiney and comes off like "get off my lawn!" and doesn't really add much beyond the myriad of other complaints. Thing is that I don't really think that many people love developing this way, it's just that nobody will pay anyone to shovel our way out from under this mess of technical debt. GUI development on windows is a schizophrenic mess and then you want to be cross platform? The only options are Qt, Wx, and Electron... or imgui... or lispworks CAPI or something. Electron has permissive licensing and you can hire JS devs and most importantly you can externalize a fair bit of the debt onto the end user as power and compute resource consumption.

It's just like everything else in today's economy -- incredibly short sighted and whatever you make will either evaporate or be someone else's problem in short order. But, that's how you behave in such an environment! You'd get fired for writing a cross platform toolkit if the the expectations are set through the current climate of shipping shit apps quickly. Apps that function just well enough to retain a subscription or shovel ads or mine data or upsell or whatever.

You'd have to change the entire reason why people are paid to write software to fix this. People aren't "stupid," they're on average lowish skill (JS bootcamp to first hire...) and behaving rationally under the incentives.