I am absolutely certain you're right. The forcing function to achieve a respectable level of quality before you ship isn't there in an always-online world. The

I am absolutely certain you're right. The forcing function to achieve a respectable level of quality before you ship isn't there in an always-online world. The other big factor IMHO is the amount of speculative money that has poured into the industry in recent times. That has allowed a lot of businesses to survive for longer than they naturally could despite shipping junk and that in turn has taught users/customers that expecting better software is unrealistic. Even most unicorn tech businesses (FAANG etc.) still produce a lot of junk and little that is any good - relative to the almost unimaginable scale of resources they have available - because usually they reached that unicorn status by having one or at most a few massive successes that they can defend and that then subsidise all the bad decisions and junk products just as effectively as VC funding rounds.