You must not have actually experienced computing in the past.
In the dark, distant past, we wrote programs that ran in kilobytes of memory on a double-digit-MHz CPU. Multiple cores or threads did not exist.
Today, the same program requires gigabytes of RAM and takes multiple seconds to do the same work with 32 4GHz CPUs.
This is truly not an exaggeration. Everyone who actually handled a Windows 95 machine in its natural environment will tell you that the experience of using a computer today is ten times slower and forty times more frustrating. Computers are slower than they ever have been, despite having hardware that is fast beyond the limits of anything we even dared to dream of in the 90s.
I used Win 95 and NT and computers today are blazingly faster, but obviously requires much more resources to achieve that.
Win 95 was not only slow, but also prone to hangings of all kinds and it was hard to keep it up for more than a few days without a crash or a needed reset.
Consuming a huge amount of unnecessary resources is a modern problem, but it doesn't make software quality any less, well depending on how you define quality.
The bug in the 1980's Therac-25 software killed people, bugs in the Patriot system causing it not to intercept Iraqi Scuds killed people in 1991 and the Mars Pathfinder required an interstellar software update in 1997 to fix a bug.
I'm willing to bet you are just simply not exposed to bleeding edge tech, and thus dont understand the need for it.
Its definitely overused in certain circumstances, when you could just roll out a monolithic code base on a single server, but in many cases now, systems get built that were impossible to build in the past
In the dark, distant past, we wrote programs that ran in kilobytes of memory on a double-digit-MHz CPU. Multiple cores or threads did not exist.
Today, the same program requires gigabytes of RAM and takes multiple seconds to do the same work with 32 4GHz CPUs.
This is truly not an exaggeration. Everyone who actually handled a Windows 95 machine in its natural environment will tell you that the experience of using a computer today is ten times slower and forty times more frustrating. Computers are slower than they ever have been, despite having hardware that is fast beyond the limits of anything we even dared to dream of in the 90s.