That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for.
Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.
Perhaps a circular process. Not a circular argument. It's just reality that users reward optimization they can't really notice less than features. In places where it does matter to the bottom line, like how fast a shopping page loads, the optimization is prioritized.
Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.