I thought software systems would become more and more reliable with continuous refinement over time. Servers would never go down, operating systems would have

I thought software systems would become more and more reliable with continuous refinement over time. Servers would never go down, operating systems would have no new features and would be considered finished, applications would be stable and unchanging, and all that code we all hacked would be reviewed and improved. We'd have a reliable stable base to build new things on top of with tried and tested methods. Instead companies created an endless churn of features, rewrote everything because fixing the old problems seemed too difficult (hence inventing endless new problems), hacked new languages for convenience (and to create lock-in) then rediscovered why all that complexity was in the old languages, security was ignored, everyone built new code layered on top of the old stuff we hacked instead of fixing the old code, and everyone switched to commodity hardware creating a race to the bottom driven by low cost. I've been expecting computing infrastructure to crumble for many years. I think the many modern problems with computing and networks, security in particular but also reliability, indicate it is starting to happen. It will take decades to fix. Part of the problem seems to be the limited lifespan of people. The old engineers retire and are replaced by the young and a lot of hard won knowledge is lost. Books and the code itself pass on some of that knowledge but it is incomplete (or ignored because who wants to spend the time? We need something new to sell in three months.)