I’ve not read the article, but if you actually look at old code, it’s pretty awful too. If you try using Windows 95 or something, you will cry and weep. Linux used to be so much more painful 20 years ago too; anyone remember “plasma doesn’t crash” proto-memes? So, “BEFORE QUALITY” thing is absolute bullshit. What is happening today is that more and more people can do stuff with computers, so naturally you get “chaos”, as in a lot of software that does things, perhaps not in the best way possible, but does them nonetheless; you will still have more professional developers doing their things and building great software. What I can agree more is that capitalism doesn’t reward good quality software in general, so the quality trend for anything vaguely commercial is going to be slightly down; see enshittification (once again, and old concept).