I learned about distributed incrementally -monotonic logs back at the late 90s, with many other …

I think your points are pretty spot on - most things have already been invented, and there's too much of a move-fast-and-break-things mentality. Here's a follow-up thought: to what extent did the grey-beards let us juniors down by steering us down a different path? A few instances: DB creators knew about replicated logs, but we got given DBs, not replicated log products. The Java creators knew about immutability: "I would use an immutable whenever I can." [James Gosling, 1] but it was years later when someone else provided us with pcollections/javaslang/vavr. And they're still far from widespread, and nowhere near the standard library. Brendan Eich supposedly wanted to put Scheme into browsers, but his superiors had him make JS instead. What other stuff have we been missing out on? [1] https://www.artima.com/articles/james-gosling-on-java-may-20...

This is certainly building on principles and ideas from a long history of computer science research. And yes, there are moment where you go "oh, we implicitly gave up xyz (i.e., causal order across steps) when we started adopting architecture pqr (microservices). But here is a thought on how to bring that back without breaking the benefits of pqr". If you want, you can think of this as one of these cases. I would argue that there is tremendous practical value in that (I found that to be the case throughout my career). And technology advances in zig zag lines. You add capability x but lose y on the way and later someone finds a way to have x and y together. That's progress.

When I was in school I had an optional requirement. You had to take one out of 2 or 3 classes to graduate. That was compiler design, which was getting terrible reviews from my peers who were taking it the semester before me, or distributed computing. Might have been a third but if so it was unmemorable. So I took distributed computing. Which ended up being one of the four classes that satisfied the 80/20 rule for my college education. Quite recently I started asking coworkers if they took such a class and was shocked to learn how many not only didn’t take it, but could not even recall it being an option at their school. What? I can understand it being rare in the 90’s but the 00’s and on were paying attention to horizontal scaling, and the 2020’s are rotten with it distributed computing concerns. How… why… I don’t understand how we got here.