You need a new phone and laptop and faster Internet every couple of years because they can't be bothered to build better software because the people building it have a new phone and laptop and Internet every couple of years.
Discussion
A lot of what you think of as essential software developments are just indifference and lack of ingenuity.
They don't need to do anything groundbreaking, completely reorganize the workflows, rethink their data transmission concept, fix bugs, or refactor. They can just say:
You need a bigger battery.
In the 90s I worked for a company where the quality assurance team had to use a special older computer with less ram, slow internet connection and so on to make sure new releases work on our customers computers also.
All that Adware bloat needs RAM
Oh man, how fast did my Windows 95 boot and start apps!
I always thought Microsoft's business plan was to bloat their operating system and Office so you needed a new computer that came with ... ... ... new MS OS and MS Office. They forced you to buy new software by making their old software slower and slower, so you had to buy better hardware that came with more of their bloated software.
I don't use MS office any more. I use Libre Office. I'd love to get away from MS Windows, but my work software only runs on it.
We use Linux Mint, for the house computer, but it has a dual boot with Windows because of such limitations.
CPUs and virtualization tech like wine have gotten far enough I might stop giving windows stuff bare metal access at this point and keep it in virtualization (VMs / compatibility layers)
And so many business's rely on this. I've spoken to some founders of typescript/python products that simply don't care because it's good enough. As I have said before: "people don't want good, they want good enough" And I will probably say that till I die as a perfectionist.
Absolutely true, there are 100 layers of software on top of every current development.
But on the other hand if you want to develop at the pace imposed by the market you have to use third-party libraries instead of reimplementing at a low level. The eternal dilemma
It's just more inflation, IMO.
The market conditions will change, once people are broke enough and decide their current phone will just have to do.