I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?

It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.

Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).

Real talk.

Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.

That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?