That reminds me of Jon Blow’s talk, which has a lot of similar themes around complexity growing too quickly for anyone to keep track. He’s also especially worried that we’ll lose the knowledge of the lower levels, as new programmers gravitate towards the top levels (e.g. everyone builds apps instead of going into OS or browser engines).

I’m not sure I subscribe to the “everything will collapse” scenario, but I think there might come a time where we will essentially get stuck. Maybe it already happened, Electron apps are cool because they can do all kinds of flashy things very easily that would take a lot of work to build otherwise. If you don’t like Electron, you’re often stuck with a UX of the past, and the common user just doesn’t make that trade off, so software houses don’t.