You know the saying about OSHA rules "they're written in blood"?

That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.

So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.

> then Google used anticompetitive practices to squash it

Not exactly. Apple happened.

Every "web designer" had to work on a macbook to be different like every one else. And firefox had dismal performances on those macbooks so said designers turned to the only browser with good tools and good enough performances: Chrome.

Next time you're told "performances don't matter", remember how it can be a differentiating feature and could cost you your market share.

> They'd also semi-implemented DDD.

One of my pet-peeves. "We're doing DDD, hexagonal architecture, CQRS". So, when was the last time your dev team had a conversation with your domain experts? You have access to domain experts don't you? What does your ubiquitous language look like?

So no, some "senior" read a blog post (and usually just diagonally) and ran with it and now monkey see monkey does is in full effect.

And you get the same shit with everything. How many "manager" read one of the books about the method they tell you they're implementing (or any book about management) ? How many TDD shop where QA and dev are still separate silos? How many CI/CD with no test suite at all? Kanban with no physical board, no agreed upon WIP limits, no queue replenishing system but we use the Kanban board in JIRA.

> Developers almost universally lack discipline.

Or developers are given a deadline and no slack to learn the code base. So developers will tactically take the fastest route to closing their ticket.

It was too early.

The UI was slow due to the browser not being able to handle it. A new Wave with top performance on phones would have a chance of becoming a thing.