I (unfortunately) doubt it. I think the reality with our current situation is that only hobbyists and open source people care enough about that to do anything about it. Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint, and any "pre-mature optimization" is evil and must be avoided. The result will be more of the same bloat. Competition won't help because everybody is using the same bloated foundations and nobody will invest more than a few days in the foundation because it's not "product work."
The best we can hope for I think is that open source will create frameworks/foundations on top of which people can then try to build. Elixir Phoenix has been that to some extent, basically taking the rails philosophy but making it super light and fast (my Phoenix APIs run with 40MiB of memory and response times ~1ms). Maybe those sorts of advancements can save us, but I can't think of a way to address the browser that way and realistically right now the browser is a huge area of the bloat. A ton of code that runs in the browser is terribly optimized, but even the base is quite big.
That's exponential era practices. But we're hitting the top of the S curve. Believing that exponential era practices will continue indefinitely into the coming linear/level era is as naive as believing exponential growth continues forever.
The real question is what happens first: change in software to adapt to slow growing compute or change in architecture to revitalize Moore's law.
Oh, I don't think it's quite that grim. When development teams can no longer easily spend their way out of their inefficient code, being able to write high performance code becomes a competitive advantage. I'd even go so far as to say that individual developers looking to get ahead in their careers should pay less attention to flashy tech fads and more at foundational stuff like how to diagnose performance problems and write efficient code.
> Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint
This is a gross oversimplification. While there’re inefficiencies and process abuses, this doesn’t mean nobody cares about speed and resources. It might look that way to purists who’re focused only on tech part of the businesses.
Processors used to spend most of their time sorting, after a period of wasteful bullshit they may return to hotspot's dominating again in the form of AI inference.
Eh, for the amount of work your brain accomplishes, it is insanely hyper optimized at around 20 watts. We don't have human level AI/image processing quite yet, but it would take hundreds of thousands of watts to accomplish the same thing at this time.
The best we can hope for I think is that open source will create frameworks/foundations on top of which people can then try to build. Elixir Phoenix has been that to some extent, basically taking the rails philosophy but making it super light and fast (my Phoenix APIs run with 40MiB of memory and response times ~1ms). Maybe those sorts of advancements can save us, but I can't think of a way to address the browser that way and realistically right now the browser is a huge area of the bloat. A ton of code that runs in the browser is terribly optimized, but even the base is quite big.