Comment by isodev
I think what has changed mainly is that today we have tools, languages and entire ecosystems that exist only as means to support someone’s product line.
Take Swift for example. A giant gatekeeper of a corp decided to make it the only (reasonable) way to build apps and so it exists, powered by countless indie developers constantly creating content around it. Would Swift be a thing without everyone being forced to use it? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.
So in some ways we’ve traded unique and effective solutions to “popular and mainstream” things that scream the loudest. You wouldn’t get fired for choosing Swift. Or Azure.
When I was working with it (I was there, 4000 years ago) there was some talk about Swift for the server, but neither obj-C nor Swift ever really breached containment of the Apple ecosystem and -tooling. Which is a shame because at the time I enjoyed working in XCode. Who knew using a mouse swipe to go back in your code would be so natural? Not any other IDE developer, ever.
Last time I worked with it it felt very sluggish and buggy though, in theory building UI elements with SwiftUI is great, in practice it was slow and needed to restart very often, and that was with simple components.