There are many kinds of efficiency, and some of them matter more than others.
We as a society have voted with our wallets that yes, we really really want a process that is efficient on creating more features within the same amount of developer-time instead of a process that creates more computationally efficient features.
The increased hardware capacity has been appropriately used - we wanted a way to develop more software features faster, and better hardware has allowed us to use techniques and abstraction layers that allow us to do that, but would be infeasible earlier because of performance problems.
It's not an anti-pattern that occurred accidentally, it accurately reflects our goals, needs and desires. We intentionally made a series of choices that yes, we'd like a 3% improvement in the speed&convenience of shipping shiny stuff at the cost of halving the speed and doubling memory usage, as long as the speed and resource usage is sufficient in the end.
And if we get an order of magnitude better hardware after a few years, that's how we'll use that hardware in most cases. If we gain more headroom for computational efficiency, then we've once again gained a resource that's worthless as-is (because speed/resource usage was already sufficiently good enough) but can be traded off for something that's actually valuable to us (e.g. faster development of shinier features).
We as a society have voted with our wallets that yes, we really really want a process that is efficient on creating more features within the same amount of developer-time instead of a process that creates more computationally efficient features.
The increased hardware capacity has been appropriately used - we wanted a way to develop more software features faster, and better hardware has allowed us to use techniques and abstraction layers that allow us to do that, but would be infeasible earlier because of performance problems.
It's not an anti-pattern that occurred accidentally, it accurately reflects our goals, needs and desires. We intentionally made a series of choices that yes, we'd like a 3% improvement in the speed&convenience of shipping shiny stuff at the cost of halving the speed and doubling memory usage, as long as the speed and resource usage is sufficient in the end.
And if we get an order of magnitude better hardware after a few years, that's how we'll use that hardware in most cases. If we gain more headroom for computational efficiency, then we've once again gained a resource that's worthless as-is (because speed/resource usage was already sufficiently good enough) but can be traded off for something that's actually valuable to us (e.g. faster development of shinier features).