They didn't succeed per-se, they rode a gigantic wave of free money and barely avoided catastrophe.

I think much of what we see there is really heroic efforts: subsystems get swapped out with things that suck less, PHP gets a new optimized runtime, etc. Basically - unsung people do the hard work that rights the ship, meanwhile 10x more people are adding tons of crap and it barely balances out.

Now that 10x is more like 1000x - and if we don't use these tools responsibly, I think we'll see the costs outweigh any kind of benefit.

Or I could be completely wrong. Worse might actually be better. People can vibe up a new replacement thing when the original thing becomes unmaintainable. That feels wrong/gross to me, but maybe I'm just old fashioned (like the old folks from Inmos/Symbolics/Transmeta were).