St. Domingue (now Haiti) was France's wealthiest overseas possession in 1790. It was a human meat-grinder as slave life expectancy was low from being worked and whipped to death on the plantations.
The slaves rebelled, fought the French and won. But then France was her enemy and tried to extract any remaining wealth in Haiti as "repayment" for their lost plantations.
That set Haiti back really bad in development deficits that are still very present.
Some of this increase is attributable to lowering taxes brings more income out of the shadows and on to the tax return. If we lowered the marginal rate to 1% I think we’d see a lot more income appear on tax returns that is either unreported or creatively expenses at present tax rates.
the advance of minifies and transpilers and modules doesnt seem to increase page performance. one of the effect of it being so efficient to minify and transpile is that large imports and frameworks are easier to use, and that boosts the total JS lines of code, making the JS parsing take a long time, and the page performance get "janky"
Mediocrity expands to fill the space and time available.
Mediocre solutions are fixed with an endless array of tools. Learning tools takes time. And that's just to break even. And around we go again.
Can we really say the average web experience is better than the average of 10 or just 5 years ago? (Hint: Nope.) Find someone who is less frustrated with technology and you'll find someone who has given up on technology.
One reason for them to scale to 10x F-Large on Heroku is that their app gets super-slammed (150x more than average traffic) around college application deadlines. So they can spend most their time on cheap Heroku and just temporarily scale to super expensive Heroku for a short time.