I believe this kind of disillusion could not only simply explained by burnout. It's more like the Blue pill vs Red pill thing. Once you learned, you cannot unle

I believe this kind of disillusion could not only simply explained by burnout. It's more like the Blue pill vs Red pill thing. Once you learned, you cannot unlearn. Blue pilled people are totally okay with these things, while some Red pilled people cannot get rid of their cynical views, and the feeling of defeating. I work for a tech consultancy, apart from programming stuff, I also need to propose technical solutions to the clients, presenting slides with buzz word technologies which are actually very mediocre for me. Everybody else seems to be excited by those technologies. I can bear with it but sometimes I have same feeling as OP. If I own a startup doing similar business I would directly choose totally different sets of novel technologies that are much smaller, faster, outperform those solutions in almost every dimension. Technologies are usually overlooked or being witch-hunted for tens of years. What we usually do today, there were a small bunch of people already knew them quite well more than half a century ago. That might mean now, you can already do what people usually do tens of years later, but too few people would agree with you. Just like John Barkus have to face "FORTRAN is extremely inefficient" bullshit for quite a while. After FORTRAN got rid of the inefficient reputation, he was interested in functional programming back in the day, while functional programming was even being witch-hunted till this day. Imagine you have been thrown back to 1995, and a part of your job is to declare the "Blub Programming Language™"'s novelty over other languages to everybody (that would be a real job since there were so much marketing on the "Blub Programming Language™" back in the day), while there are even no basic things like parametric polymorphism and higher-order functions such as map and filter. Everybody was in hype, and completely ignore your cynical view on "Blub Programming Language™", despite the fact that those novel concepts are: very useful / straight forward to learn / already well established in the 1960s.