The "glass half full" perspective here. The OP misses one hugely important factor: cost and hence availability of computing resources. During the recent histor

The "glass half full" perspective here. The OP misses one hugely important factor: cost and hence availability of computing resources. During the recent history of computing, the technology improvement opened new possibilities at each step: - Punching cards: allowed more people share mainframe, - Video terminals: allowed faster turnaround of mainframe jobs, - Mini-computers: gave more people access to computing, - PCs: got even more people into computing, - Commodity hardware in datacenters: more people could develop services and more people from general public could get access to applications and data, - Cloud: more people could afford to build applications, - Microservices: bigger teams could collaborate on increasingly sophisticated services, - Serverless: reduced the burden of capacity planning and service distribution and further lowered the barrier of entry into backend application development. Each statement above comes from personal experience and I am looking forward to what new possibilities the future brings.