That tendency to rathole and nitpick, while discarding the larger point, is increasingly frustrating.
It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.
Yes, the ratholeing vs. generalizing is an interesting phenomenon. I get the sense that it's largely personality-based. Some people (most computer people) are wired up to get every detail exactly correct and if anything is out of place they break out the tweezers and start tweaking. That's exactly what's required in most engineering work. It can lead to perfecting something that's about to get thrown away.
The other personality deals with abstractions, analogies and top-down thinking. When faced with an issue they'll start by defining goals and values. And it's easy to be blind to the details when you're thinking of the big picture and ask for things counter to the laws of physics.
Even if you're a two-minded kind of person and can deal with both generalities and specifics, it's incredibly hard to deal with both at once and quite a task to switch from the one mindset to the other.
If you were a hammer manufacturer, wouldn't you nitpick if someone said "I feel hammers have gotten worse since the 80's, and handles aren't what they used to be"? To many people, computers are a tool;to many IT people, they are a way of life. Its not about big picture, its about proximity- some rant about some minor detail on something you value captures more attention than something you don't care about.
It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.