It's even worse than the Uncle Bob explanation. There are thresholds of effort for certain things at largely constant levels. E.g.: designing a new language, b

It's even worse than the Uncle Bob explanation. There are thresholds of effort for certain things at largely constant levels. E.g.: designing a new language, build tool, web application framework, or database all have some minimum effort that needs to be invested. In the past, there just weren't enough developers in the entire world to "overdo" these things, so there was a relatively small pool of languages, tools, and frameworks to choose from. Now, individual corporations have armies of junior developers spitting out frameworks and query languages like a machine gun. There's so many now that you or I haven't even heard of 99% of them! As the number of available developers grows exponentially, so does their capacity to "reinvent wheels". Their ignorance of existing wheels to they could be reusing grows exponentially also. The result is an exponentially exploding set of ad-hoc, incompatible systems. In my recent semi-DevOps, semi-Cloud-Engineer role I've come across an absolutely bewildering array of tools even when I've generally restricted things to one cloud and one language's ecosystem. Heaven help you if your project has multiple languages!