I feel like this post has some nuance or clever wordplay that I'm missing. So if that's the case, apologies for adding noise. But in the real world, the waterf

I feel like this post has some nuance or clever wordplay that I'm missing. So if that's the case, apologies for adding noise. But in the real world, the waterfall model was absolutely not a "strawman", but instead was literally how almost all software was built, up to even the turn of the century and beyond. Software projects were smaller in general, compiling was a major undertaken, you collaborated on projects by sending files around or, best case, working on a shared network directory. The pace of change of tooling and "libraries" was much slower and more predictable. As we got source control, intellisense, massive knowledge bases, and then the rapid iteration of code sharing in the form of libraries and so on, things started changing because the model was too slow. But it was absolutely real and the norm.