Venkat Rao noticed this and turned it into a rather excellent essay: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules

> The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

> As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

Thank you for the link, that was a great essay and now I need to reread the Discworld novels.