Comment by blakehaswell

> did Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc all make a terrible engineering mistake?

Is that so impossible? There are many other considerations that go into technology choices at these companies. There are trade-offs involved, and for companies with huge teams of developers the considerations need to be very different than for small–medium sized groups of developers.

I would argue that a smaller group of developers can focus much more on user experience and engineering efficiency, whereas a large company has a organisational scaling issues and a significant bureaucracy to support. At a large company, engineering considerations come second to very many things. It would actually be surprising if the trade-offs and choices those companies made were correct for other very different companies.