Back in the day there was no real benefit. Today it's different as most Linux distros don't really care much about supporting 32 bit anymore.

Today realistically I don't think it really makes that much sense to bother with those devices even for small home servers. You can e.g. get used thin clients for cheap which run circles around those old CPUs and support way more RAM while likely being as power efficient if not more. At the bare minimum I would avoid using any 32 bit x86 CPU for running anything modern, even Debian dropped official support for that architecture now.

If I remember correctly Microsoft put a limit on the HW specs for getting those cheap Windows copies while simultaneously making sure they all shipped with Windows which did not run that well on that low spec hardware. I think this is a huge part why this category died that quickly.

On the other hand there was also just general technological progress happening, "full size" notebooks were generally getting a lot more compact and lightweight so there was less need for that separate category.

It's part of the appeal that it is mostly just Debian under the hood. If I want to run containers I would also not see it as the best choice but it really shines in managing qemu VMs.

Indeed. Using text templating for structured documents is already quite bad, doing it with a significant whitespace language it's absolute hell.

It is of course not the best choice for everything, there are enough things where you better just spin up a VM and deploy directly or with only a simple container runtime if you use containers.

Then there is probably also a lot of time pressure on the people implementing and operating those scrapers so they have even less incentive to optimize their code.

Basically yes but there is a small difference I think. Things like Uber took an existing and proven business model. slapped an App on top and priced the competition out of the market. The winner takes it all.

With "AI" it's not yet clear if there will be any winner at all because it's not yet proven if the business model is viable at the "real" price. Think air taxis across town, 5$ a ride, will work at scale for sure, probably won't work for 500$.

You don't have to do crazy things with Ansible for that yaml DSL becoming the opposite of helpful. Things which would be quite straightforward to express in code become quite cumbersome, hard to understand and hard to debug. Also Jinja is often a horrible choice (you don't have in Ansible). Also Ansible excessively requires it in places where you want proper types and not just a string.