Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.

Well, the big issue is that there's only this much demand. How many web browsers is there genuine end user demand for, worldwide? Probably just 1. Several are made thanks to other demands by large corporations. How much value does a web browser provide, to billions of people who use it? What ever the number may be, it's orders of magnitude more than it costs to develop.

Why is software observably hard for companies? When 90% of people are working on projects that are going nowhere, that creates a situation where competence is quite rare. Because in most projects it is objectively unnecessary (would make no difference). Where majority of software engineers never seen a successful project all the way from the start to the finish line.

Then there's startups, these are (predominantly) mere vehicles for moving money from the coffers of large publicly traded corporations into pockets of VCs (who sell startups to said corporations). Whole world of pretend software engineering.

Then there's large corporations, where CEOs want to get paid more and to be able to get paid more they need to add more layers to the hierarchy underneath them, which they need to fill somehow, and they can't fill on merit because they just don't have enough stuff happening that they could measure merit in.

edit: basically the management always wants to do the equivalent of having hired a dozen heart surgeons to work on one heart and a "heart surgery architect" as well, the more layers the better because the more layers the higher is the pay their layer can get.