> bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why?
Why? The (ultimately unsuccessful) quest for the silver bullet. Nobody wants programming, they want programs - so anything that promises to deliver programs faster looks like a holy grail. Inevitably, though, the promise boils down to a pre-packaged implementation of an existing approach that does something relatively specific, with some options for customization. If you want to step outside that customization, you not only have the assumptions baked into the new "silver bullet", you also have to understand all the nuances of the layers upon layers of other approaches (and all of their assumptions), to the point where it would be faster to just shed all the layers and do it yourself (but you can't because noooo, you're a dinosaur, you don't understand anything, it's the future, it's the modern way of doing things).
Which is why we ought to be building webs with Assembly.
Seriously though, there is an equilibrium somewhere, and on top of that a lot of stuff that is more about business and work than programming.
I may be getting out of my depth here but, am I wrong to say that a good deal as to why webdev in Java is even a thing is because there were people around who knew Java to begin with? That a good deal of people learning PHP did it just because Wordpress is a thing? That react native for desktop is about people with expertise in react native being able to develop for desktop?
Workers want paychecks. Society wants products. Workers will learn to make products so they earn paychecks and if they can spend less time learning they will, obviously, do so.
Why? The (ultimately unsuccessful) quest for the silver bullet. Nobody wants programming, they want programs - so anything that promises to deliver programs faster looks like a holy grail. Inevitably, though, the promise boils down to a pre-packaged implementation of an existing approach that does something relatively specific, with some options for customization. If you want to step outside that customization, you not only have the assumptions baked into the new "silver bullet", you also have to understand all the nuances of the layers upon layers of other approaches (and all of their assumptions), to the point where it would be faster to just shed all the layers and do it yourself (but you can't because noooo, you're a dinosaur, you don't understand anything, it's the future, it's the modern way of doing things).