Hmm. This is hand made clothes and furniture vs factory mass production.
Nobody doubts the prior is better and some people make money doing it, but that market is a niche because most people prioritize price and 80/20 tradeoffs.
Average mass produced clothes are better than average hand made clothing. When we think of hand made clothing now, we think of the boutique hand made clothing of only the finest clothing makers who have survived in the new market by selling to the few who can afford their niche high-end products.
Quality also varied over time, if I recall correctly. Machine made generally starts worse, but with refinement ends up better from superhuman specialization of machines to provide fine detail with tighter tolerances than even artisans can manage.
The only perk artisans enjoy then is uniqueness of the product as opposed to one-size fits all of mass manufacturing. But the end result is that while we still have tailors for when we want to get fancy, our clothes are nearly entirely machine made.
A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves the needle for 90% of companies.
Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend that works across all browsers and devices and not just on the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the bills.
> When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website
When you think 99.99% of company websites are garbage, it might be your rating scale that is broken.
This reminds me of all the people who rage at Amazon’s web design without realizing that it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
