It’s well-established consensus that software is slower and more bloated than it was 20, 40 years ago.
Yep this is very clear. We can also build much more complex software today with better development tools.
The opinion that Wayne looks at here is that customers don't care about fast software they care about features.
He makes some really good arguments as to where this opinion falls down:
Chrome originally got popular because it was a lot faster than Firefox and IE
VS Code ate Atom’s lunch, in part by having a much faster startup time.
both of these examples certainly aren't feature related. The product adoption was based purely on speed.
So I think an interesting question isn’t "why don’t people care about fast software", because they do. People really don’t like slow, buggy software! The more interesting question is "why don’t people avoid slow software."
A lot of this boils down to "people don't have a choice" and "there's no better alternatives".