Software has become more immature over the last decades because developers lost the engineering mindset and skills to write optimized software like they could back in the days where we only had a couple of MB of ram.

It really does not require new expertise or tech at all to cut latency and load times by 90%. Programmers have to get back to being engineers instead of just duct taping libraries together or praying that the dumb GC knows what its doing

Are customers willing to pay 10x the cost for the mildly better experience?

At most places, there’s barely enough time to implement things completely let alone to optimize everything properly.

It’s also noteworthy that optimizing 10kloc from yesteryear is a much easier task than optimizing a few mloc of code today.

We didn’t just lose all those optimized libraries. The requirements bloated and nobody wants to reduce features.

I would argue that the only reason we went from 10kloc to +1mloc is because of the proliferation of bad coding practices...like OOP

Simple. Kill Electron immediately, fucking Slack being so slow on a multi core modern PC is ridiculous. It's IRC ffs.