Ha. I'm quite happy that I started off my career coding in C++ and then subsequently moved away towards web tech. It's nice having appreciation for the lower-level aspects of PLs, but I feel more comfortable working at higher levels of abstraction and being able to make full-featured products with less effort, thanks to an abundance of computing power in most computers.
Maybe I overgeneralised - I had most personal computing devices in mind, which I'm most interested in developing for. I appreciate that there's orders of magnitude more computing devices that do not fall into that category.
In my opinion as a non-professional hobbyist developer and a software "consumer", the main problem of current software trends is that they rely on computing power too much. I understand why a developer might want to quickly implement and test an idea using high level languages and no optimization. However, it feels like nowadays, developers are not moving on from the "rapid prototyping" stage to the "optimization" stage, almost like abandoning a project, yet they always keep adding new stuff.
We are heading for a personal dystopia of mine everyone's attention spans are too short in every aspect of the life. People are addicted to new stimuli, whether it be the next 1 minute video in the timeline, or a new feature for the software that will never be "mature" due to all the other new features.
I think there's value in taking a balanced approach to writing software - use high level PLs and their frameworks but use them well (i.e. take the time to learn them and their patterns, and not just hack away). This way we're not excessively wasting resources doing redundant processing and we're not stuck for hours trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the cpu. I get your point about not advancing from the prototype stage in terms of the codebase, but if it's 'good enough', then there are always more important problems to tackle.
As for your second point, it's already been happening for quite some time. Can we blame people though? Every product we use is engineered to perfection to beat human psychology and make us indulge more and more. It's hard to protect yourself against something like that if you realise this is a problem, let alone if you don't. It doesn't just apply to technology but other areas too, take food for example.
