Modern programs are 100 times slower, but they definitely aren't 100 times more functional. And speed is a part of functionality and UX! I don't want to have to use a high-powered workstation or a gaming laptop to get reasonable responsiveness in my text editor. Many Javascript-powered websites with 'fancy' canvas features are janky and slow as shit on hardware that's only 10 years old, where as websites that use HTML are still snappy and fast.
That 'nothing at all' matters when our current culture involves building layers and layers and mountains of stacks on top of software. That 30 ms compounds, because everyone working on each layer thinks 'hey, this is a bit slow, but it doesn't matter because it's only milliseconds.' Given this, it's obvious that modern software will be as slow and inefficient as it possibly can be before normal people notice and complain (usually only because they've used other equivalent software that's smoother and faster- it's easy to get used to jank, like low FPS in a video game.)
I think that people undervalue the cost of all these layers of abstraction.
That 'nothing at all' matters when our current culture involves building layers and layers and mountains of stacks on top of software. That 30 ms compounds, because everyone working on each layer thinks 'hey, this is a bit slow, but it doesn't matter because it's only milliseconds.' Given this, it's obvious that modern software will be as slow and inefficient as it possibly can be before normal people notice and complain (usually only because they've used other equivalent software that's smoother and faster- it's easy to get used to jank, like low FPS in a video game.)
I think that people undervalue the cost of all these layers of abstraction.