Been in software 25 years and was board design for telecom before that.

Vaunted is a vanity word.

I get what you mean based upon experience and I still prefer custom systems that eschew layers of syntax sugar. EE was way harder than managing a code base. The syntax patterns are of a finite set of values.

I won’t re-roll encryption libs but there’s a lot of “tooling” packages that just add syntax sugar to parse and cart around that came about in prior eras of sneakerware software that are baked into to development habits that no longer make sense.

I for one am excited about using ML to streamline the code base that comprised my preferred Linux system yet still builds to the usual runtime system. There’s a lot of duplication in code that models can help remove and a few tools can help unpack into machine state. EE brain informs me there’s no “code” in a running system. Just electricity. There’s way too much syntax sugar in the software ecosystem that’s just for parsing/marshaling/transpiling between syntax sugars. Bleh. It’s a big dumb monolith of glyph art that needs to be whacked back like a prairie that needs a controlled fire.