There are a few things to parse here.

1. In terms of software efficiency, engineers may lament the perceived waste, inefficiency, and imperfection in the produced code, but from a business standpoint it is a rational cost/benefit decision. It is useful to view software through the lens of economics. In economics there is a concept that Labor (e.g. a software engineer) and Capital (e.g. servers, infrastructure) are substitutable. Many sub-optimal programs and systems built with reduced labor cost are perfectly usable by substituting more hardware. Optimization only makes sense where there is a clear benefit that exceeds the cost.

Thus, as a contrived or extreme example, would a manager spend $200k in labor to produce a highly optimized program, hand-crafted in assembly, or spend $500 in labor to produce a program in a higher level language such as Java, that does the same thing but uses more compute resources? The spread in cost between those two choices allows one to throw a lot of hardware at the sub-optimal program. Thus it is frequently a better business decision to produce inefficient software and throw more hardware at it. It may make the engineer feel bad, but what they wish to optimize is not aligned with what the business wishes or needs to optimize.

2. In terms of the short 'shelf-life' of software, the same problem infects hardware, consumer electronics, and other products. I've purchased a number of IPads for my family over the years. After a few years and IOS versions, more and more apps stop being compatible, until it becomes effectively useless even though the hardware is the same as when I bought it.

Again let's view this through the lens of economics. A cynic will look at the IPad situation and and think 'What better way to separate me from my money than to force me to buy a new product every few years, solely by software shenanigans?' Of course businesses enjoy selling more product, but they also have cost constraints in order to be viable (ignoring those who are perhaps making 'obscene profits' before competitors take notice, as my econ professor used to shout so passionately).

We might consider as an alternative that it is simply too expensive to maintain many versions of an app, on multiple platforms, with backwards compatibility and security concerns. The business instead is making a rational decision to only support their application on the OS versions and platforms that the majority of their customers are running at any point in time, similar to how a web developer at some point has to stop bothering to ensure their site works in IE 5.0.

None of that reduces my frustration at planned obsolescence but maybe this is just the reality of things.

3. I'm on the fence about the labor-exploitation part: this seems like a different and very complex issue. Some may argue that more hardware manufacturing provides good jobs without extended education or training requirements, while others may argue that those jobs are exploitative because the working conditions are poorly regulated or the position does not pay enough by their standard.

At a macro level, global poverty levels have significantly decreased over the past 30 years [1], so humanity seems to be doing something right. An optimist may say that as regions of the world move out of poverty, the regulatory environment will inevitably follow to reduce abuse, pollution, and safety risks. Time will tell but it requires patience - human systems are slow to change, in contrast to software and hardware.

[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/april-2022-global-pover...