We can't go back to the old way of doing things but we can't keep maintaining these fundamentally flawed systems either.

That's a great way of putting it, thanks. I'm actually only 30 years old (lol). Sometimes I feel there's so few people who've ever used or written software at this level in the part of the industry I find myself in. It seems more common to throw money at Amazon, Microsoft, and more staff.

I've replaced big Java systems with small Go programs and rescued stalled projects trying to adopt Kubernetes. My fave was a failed attempt to adopt k8s for fault tolerance when all that was going on was an inability to code around TCP resets (concurrent programming helped here). That team wasn't "unskilled"; they were just normal people being crushed by complexity. I could help because they just weren't familiar with the kind of problem solving I was, nor what tooling is available without installing extra stuff and dependencies.

Thanks for your understanding :)

I see that the problem arises from the "visionary, but lower experienced newer developers (compared to the past generation) " trying to fix a world where "don't touch it if it works crowd who has seen all old timers" built, by putting each layer over the older one. It has all the capabilities, but there is no "single vision", no "well defined api".

Old established paradigms are being broken. Some conventions are forgotten, new tooling and perspectives are being built.

Sure this means there is an unfortunate clash is happening.

I can't say if this is a better, or wiser world or not, however I can only say this is the way now. You can adapt, try to embrace and push forward things or you can try to stay away and become one of the legendary Cobol developer crowd. We know they are there in the wild, but we can't find them.