It seems that in addition to the issue were some things were actually tedious to do, there has also always been a drive to wow users (or really other devs?) by doing something that pushes the boundaries of what's possible. Once someone has done it, everyone is expected to do it and now work is tedious again. A simple example is how back in 2009/10 everyone was all excited about rounded corners. You had to cut all these assets and got a more complex DOM but it became table stakes. So CSS got an attribute for this. Then we needed fancy grids everywhere and fourteenth elements on mobile which was tedious till frameworks did some of it. I think the wow-treadmill doesn't exist like this on the backend because nobody sees it. The closest equivalent is scaling your architecture for a level that your app will never need.