[dredmorbius]

The other element is that a large portion (and probably the vast majority) of technology and business "journalism" is very thinly veiled boosterism and promotion.

And this isn't a particularly recent phenomenon, it's largely always been thus, at least for values of "always" dating to the late 1970s / early 1980s.

Idea (wo)men need to find money (wo)men, so recruit a PR agent to spread good buzz to churn up investment. There are the occasional hits, but a hell of a lot of misses. And if you're sitting on the churning dust cloud that is the expanding edge of the boom / development, there's a hell of a lot of noise and false leads.

Truly enduring changes tend to be based in deep, deep technology, most are a minimum of a decade old, if not several, and the truly good concepts are decades to centuries old (there's a reason they keep emerging: they serve a real need). Fads are often fanciful, contrived, or serve a narrow set of interests.

Unfortunately it gets really hard to detect the signal amidst all the sound and fury. Age and a solid grounding in history help more than the young might think.