One class of issue: It made interacting with the file system slower, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Stuff like watching files, or statting a large number files, didn’t have the same performance characteristics. So you have a situation where you (probably) already have too many components that are too complicated or poorly understood to install them all on a developer’s machine, but they work on this exact machine snapshot, but now you have to figure out what process dared to stat a few thousand files.

Docker was also just always… there. In the menu bar. Doing stuff. Running system-wide. Updating itself, constantly. Like it’s Steam or Battle.net (which for some reason downloads updates to Warcraft III, an old game, multiple times a day on my kids’ PC, and sometimes breaks and you can’t play the game; this is the level of enshittification we are at).

The command-line experience… similar to git (that is, poor). There’s an underlying conceptual model that’s sort of half abstracted away by the tools and hard to find a good explanation of.

Developer tools like this have a tax: You spend at least half a day a week Googling for issues with them, forever. Same with NPM. All it takes is five such tools in your stack and every weekday morning is gone. And that’s disregarding the fact that you were probably in the middle of actually trying to get something done.

[0] https://freshrss.org/

[1] https://netnewswire.com/