If you can mostly stick to the declarative way, it's still a benefit. No Turing-complete language completely prevents you from writing "bad" code. "You are not completely prevented from doing things that are hard to understand" is a bad argument. "You are encouraged to do things that are hard to understand" is a good one (looking at you, Perl).

"Modern CMake" is more about scoping all properties to the targets that they belong to (including stuff like what you also need to link against if you link against target foo) than about language features. The CMake language hasn't changed much except correcting some early weirdness about "if" and the addition of generator expressions, which are fortunately not often needed.

>actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1

You have just discovered that SUVs are large because some people want their cars to be large. They come with all the downsides of that and not much of the upsides.

They don't come with all the downsides. They externalise the reduced forward visibility for people behind you, the headlights spinning onto other users' cabins, the running over of toddlers, and, my favourite, the driving in the middle of the road rather than risk getting mud on their fucking tyres

No tax rate is too high. Rebates for agricultural workers maybe.

In our defence we didn’t buy the car, it was inherited. I’d have sold the thing the day it arrived if it was mine.

Imagine your supplier effectively telling you that they don't even value you (and your money) enough to bother a real human.

You can argue they did, depending on what you value. If you loved valve as a premier developer discovering unique experiences and narratives, thars been gone for 14 years now. If you valued not having your software locked down to middlemen or preferred physical media, Valved killed those off in the PC market. If you are a dev and wanted to set your own prices, Valve is current under litigation for price parties.

Its not all sunshine and windows.

>Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I

In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with alternatives. Let's not forget our history.

> Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore

That's only a matter of time, and probably not a very long time.

Sure, Valve may turn bad after Gaben. It is also possible that he thought of something for the long term that will prevent enshittification. Some companies have managed.

It seems different this time. Windows is worse and Linux is better than at previous defenestration opportunities.

You have to keep in mind that not all narcissists are literal-minded man-babies. Musk might simply have the capacity for self-deprecating humor.

>at production scale

You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing

>arm license is know to be less than friendly

Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.

RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.

> The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe

Oh? Where'd you get that information?

If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.

If anything there’s likely plenty of work for body shops like IBM in reviewing and correcting AI-generated work product that has been thrown into production recently.