The whole software vs hardware and developer vs runtime efficiency discussion is way more nuanced. No, the layers as they are currently are at least partially h

The whole software vs hardware and developer vs runtime efficiency discussion is way more nuanced. No, the layers as they are currently are at least partially hindering productivity, because they all have bugs, rather painful limitations and are constantly changing under your feet. There is so much complexity, you don't have a chance to understand it (and the implications of it) completely from the click in a client's web browser all the way to the instructions executed on the server. This is not convenient and nobody (not even Google, Facebook and others) can handle the complexity, which manifests itself in bugs, weird behaviour, surprising security holes, other rare defects and more every day. You don't want to manage memory manually unless you absolutely have to. Almost certainly, it is going to be way more demanding, you will make mistakes and the performance will not really be much better if you do whole system benchmarks for like 95% of applications. It is like using mining equipment and explosives to hang a picture on your concrete wall, it is just totally over the top. I am also not denying, there are use cases for something, where most of the responsibility is on you e.g. embedded or infrastructure software. Most people just aren't aware that they need the skill and understanding to reliably and most importantly responsibly wield it. In both cases, there is considerable room for better, more robust tools, and better methods/ practices and a great reduction in developer hubris. Some have used better hardware for saving on development effort to some degree. There are applications that really need the extra performance to help users do their work in a more convenient way - not just developers. Some of the performance is lost due to systemic inefficiencies such as the web browser and most related technologies. E.g SVG rendering in web browsers is a mine field of bugs and bad performance, so you do the rendering yourself using canvas and JavaScript, which visually is the same thing but there is a lot more work for the developer and e.g. printing/ export into PDF (where you cannot just recalculate) is where you still kind of want the vector graphics capability in some form. Virtualization has enabled slicing of the cores to serve more customers with low cost and readily available compute. We also have way more users and different security expectations now than we used to in the past, so a single machine has to handle and check more stuff or we can use a single machine for stuff that would need a data centre or wouldn't be possible/ feasible before.