I 100% agree, and this isna big reason why I find the current state of education so suboptimal. Everyone just goes on to do webdev, completely ignoring the lower levels and taking it all for granted. The thing is, there's no real innovation to be done that high up the stack. When you're that high you mostly just write glue code to stick parts someone else wrote together. Real innovation comes from quite a few levels down the stack, starting at the native code level downwards.

Like you pointed out, the current stack is heavily unoptimized and has a terrible architecture; it's only the way it is because of happenstance and tides of the market (companies always reaching for faster over better). An actual "nirvana" in computing like the other guy said would require bulldozing a good chunk of our current stack, keeping only kernels and core utilities, if even.

I really wish we had a bigger focus on getting good foundation instead of making yet another JS framework and SaaS, but then again, who's paying developers to actually do something of quality nowadays?

Comments like this is proof that the old-school hacker spirit is alive and kicking. This kind of pride in efficient and artful use of computers is needed more than ever.