In terms of using "bloated platforms" like Javascript and Python, I get a whiff of superiority from OP as there simply is no reason to build for size or speed unless it is part of the deliverable feature set. Nobody in their right mind would be writing serverless functions in C++/Rust or a Windows form to enter timesheet information (UX is about design, not platform, and is always seen as a secondary cost). If you are determined to use C++/Rust before a project has started then you're under the spell/threat of rockstar employees without a care for long term support.

The problematic Enterprise Applications I've worked on all had the same things in common, a bad maintenance plan or an expectation that the software will last decades without change. It was never, "this should have been written in xyz", its almost always that the domain knowledge has gone, and alongside it, the source code.

If you're in a business, expecting to exist in decades time, using a moving target to host your systems, like any OS, you better look at the long game, as well as the short, and factor in versioning, source control and inevitable bit rot. Its not about how old it looks, or how fast it could be.

Ultimately, there is a massive desire for businesses to offload development entirely via no-code platforms like PowerApps and absolutely no desire to make code that requires more expensive technical hires to maintain, or add more process to manage.

Finally, I've been coming across a lot of developers pining for the "old days" where you could change change things willy nilly and release it, without writing tests or having code reviews. These were the bad old days, and they're long gone. They got away with it because software was not as ubiquitous, and the internet wasn't around to spread 0-day vulnerabilities, and had very little oversight.

People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close, still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.

However, I've also seen simple pages that are line by line copies of tutorials for whole sites, pared down to a single page.

Frameworks aren't bad, unstructured working practices and environments often breed this sort of toxicity in code.

Why is it different for political organisations to manipulate the population using those tools than it is for multinationals?

This is purely a marketing exercise. They're hanging the thought experiment tag on to try and avoid undue criticism.

If someone refers to a MVC implementation as Command-Pattern, correct them. The same goes for language definitions.