> did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?

Not really? To someone who doesn't care about software, software is a means to an end of actually doing something, and everything between idea <> execution of value is basically overhead. This has always been true and the overhead is getting carved further and further down over time.

> Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?

You don't need all of this. You can basically just download Cursor, the Claude app, Claude code, opencode, whatever today and run something locally. I do think "deployment and productionization" is a bit of a gap but stuff like Replit or even Vercel + Supabase is pretty far along towards agents just being able to do most of infra for you for anything small scale, or at least tell you the buttons to press to hook things up.

> Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?

Pretty much all the LLM/agent products are obviously way ahead of form builders at this point. Take Retool for example, you could spend minutes to hours plugging together "programming-lite" concepts. A single prompt and a few minutes, and maybe 1-2 back and forths can basically get you to the same place with probably less overall jank in a lot of situations. Form-builder stuff is totally dead outside of maybe being an escape-hatch for some LLM situations, or letting users do higher-level scaffolding, but even then I think stuff like Cursor's "select the part of the app you want to change and prompt" is going to be a better UX.

> maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack

I think you are viewing this from the "tech" angle rather than the deliver value to the end user angle. The tech stack can be arbitrarily complex as long as it works to reduce end user friction and provide value with as much ease as possible. This might as well be the core idea of all consumer tech.

I think your core theses are basically "people care about the underlying tech" and "people want to learn programming or programming-adjacent" and those are both wrong for the vast vast majority of people.