[tannhaeuser]

For a latecomer, you've managed to see through a lot of bullshit, and the psychological/sociological nature of it. What you're maybe missing is that's not always been like that. Cloud, SaaS is only a thing since around 2006 when AWS hit the scene big time. Before that, we had a relatively conservative, standards-driven perspective on progress. Maybe it's also the time when the generation having learned computing from the ground up (assembler, C, hardware hacking) was starting to fade from the job market, or rather the then-new devs became eager to carve out their niche with arbitrary abstractions (but not entirely - I remember OOP bullshit from early 1990s and WS-* SOA crap from 2000s).

[wott]

The abstractionists, philosophers, theoreticists, had their days before too (60s-70s Lisp, 70s-80s Logo for teaching children). So in fact the practicalists would only have ruled in and around the 90s.

If we add all the "everything is a XXX" languages (XXX in [list, string, object, function ...]) and gather all simplificationists together, then they almost always were there, with fluctuant success at being prominent.

[p_l]

A lot of those "abstractionists" you mention were very heavily practical, too.

1980s and 1990s gave us "decision made by senior management reading shiny magazine during flight", we just look back with sentiment now combined with survivor bias.