Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...

People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.

I think it depends on what counts as doing nothing. Every time I cut my hair, I sit in a chair for ~30minutes silently without doing anything. My barber knows I don't like small talk so he just cuts my hair and that's it, there is no conversation.

I would say it is very enjoyable 30 minutes every time I do it. I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?

I am surprised to see that there isn't a lot of information about performance regression testing.

Correctness testing is important but the way SQLLite is used, potential performance drops in specific code paths or specific type of queries could be really bad for apps that use it in critical paths.

Most important property of blockchains is verifiable transparency. That is a huge deal and yes, most financial and government systems would be much better for people if they were built with that type of verifiable transparency.

Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.

Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.

It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

That is sort of my point. I think "repeatable read" is a fools gold. You think you wont need to do locking, but it is too easy to make incorrect assumptions about what guarantees "repeatable read" provides and you can make very subtle mistakes which leads to rare, extremely hard to diagnose correctness issues.

Repeatable read type of setups also make it much easier to accidentally create much longer running transactions, and long running transactions/too many concurrent open transactions/etc can create really unexpected, very hard to resolve performance issues in the long run for any database.