In theory, but not in practice. Instead, somehow we ended up writing essentially the same app over and and over, usually without reusing libs. You know because this time we'll use vue, or svelte, or phoenix, or htmx, or go, because this time we actually know what we're doing. so gotta start from the ground up and figure out how to store a row in a db as if we haven't done the same thing a million times before.

And that all under one roof. Now multiple that by thousands of roofs.

At least the devs were having fun and making good money writing all that code.

And that reason is "service businesses are too expensive in California because of high housing costs".