This article conflates the abundance of terrible software with the near absence of great software. The abundance of terrible software can easily be explained by

This article conflates the abundance of terrible software with the near absence of great software. The abundance of terrible software can easily be explained by the the growth of the sector which attracted many mediocre software engineers who just wanted a paycheck. But why is good software nowhere to be found? There have never been more talented software engineers who are willing to work hard and want to write great software. My best answer: systematic market failure. Good, reliable, carefully written software doesn't win. The best illustration I can think of is VSCode vs Sublime. Sublime Text is -- by any reasonable metric -- a great product. VSCode is slow and very buggy... but it's free and it has a plugin ecosystem that can't be beat. How can you compete with that? You can't. That's the quality problem in a nutshell.