The author's description of 2015 doesn't sound like some ancient era to me.. Have things moved on and changed so dramatically from ML hype, Microsoft Edge, Apple Watch, and ES6?
I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.
Regarding ES6: Definitely. It used to be that there’d be a new JS framework every week, and the language was rapidly evolving to catch up with over 10 years of programming language innovation. No change to the language as big as ES6 has happened since, and the Cambrian Explosion of frameworks has largely subsided.
Nowadays things are way more stable. I’m sure someone will pop in and mention how their workplace just changed from Webpack to Vite, or how hard it is to keep track of Angular, React and Vue. To which I’d chuckle and note that when I got started in 2014 we had AngularJS, Ember, React, Backbone, Knockout, Google FOAM, Polymer, OJ.js and Aurelia (which emerged as Google announced that AngularJS 1.x would be deep-sixed and Angular 2 would essentially be a totally different framework). To build/bundle your app you would use one or more of Grunt, Gulp, Brunch, Webpack, Browserify, 6to5, Traceur Google Closure Compiler and/or RequireJS (so far we’re assuming you’re not using CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or one of their downstream variants like IcedCoffeeScript).
I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.