I agree with you that it makes sense from a dev point of view but what about the users?
Imagine all restaurants and cooks in the city decide that from tomorrow they want to make their job easier so they will drop ingredients, hygiene and processing quality with 80% so they will work less and make more profits. The ones that won't follow the new way will be put out of business because they will have more expenses and the lazy ones can put some of the new profits evangelizing the new ways making it look cool.
People's decisions actually do hinge on those restaurant examples, though. Gross food? Hair in your meal? Horrible service? Restaurants can't get away with that due to stark business and reputation penalties. People will simply never come back.
Quite a different scenario than all websites taking an extra few seconds to load.
In fact there's very little a website can even do to turn off customers like a restaurant can. Imagine if HN took 10 seconds to load. Who cares? There's no "HN across the street" that I can go to that hinges on a 10 second wait time.
Right, so a native fast application would have a niche of users that care where the apps made with electron will have a larger user base because it will be cheaper to create for the developers but users will pay with lectricity and frustration.
My issue is that you can market some cheap food like "our food is cheap but good enough, come here to save money" where with software is "our software is slow,buggy,eats your battery - use it because we are lazy and we want to use latest coolest language to put on our CV".
Sure when I do a proof of concept toy project I will be lazy and use whatever I like, if I share it it will be free = I have a problem with big projects say a news site that has millions of users and your laziness(or using latest cool stuff) affects such a giant number of people.
There’s no moral obligation to make incredibly efficient and streamlined software. Solving the problem and proving sufficient value is usually enough.
Sure, they might get displaced by a competitor in the future - but by then they’ve probably got a large user base and a warchest to compete with. Slack is a great example of this.
If it’s software that’s life critical, then maybe, but that’s a small minority.
Markets and buyer preferences are always changing - I think it’s better to be agile (ie high developer velocity with talented product managers) to be able to detect and capture these shifts.
Imagine all restaurants and cooks in the city decide that from tomorrow they want to make their job easier so they will drop ingredients, hygiene and processing quality with 80% so they will work less and make more profits. The ones that won't follow the new way will be put out of business because they will have more expenses and the lazy ones can put some of the new profits evangelizing the new ways making it look cool.