It's a variation of Parkinson's Law -- we just keep expanding what we are doing to fit the hardware available to us, then claiming that nothing has changed.
CI is a fairly new thing. The idea of constantly doing all that compute work again and again was unfathomable not that long ago for most teams. We layer on and load in loads of ancillary processes, checks, lints, and so on, because we have the headroom. And then we reminisce about the days when we did a bi-monthly build on a "build box", forgetting how minimalist it actually was.
I don't totally agree. It's what a short-term view of the economy rewards for sure. But even if that was the only view of the economy I've seen plenty of low-performance software written purely out of cargo culting and/or inability or lack of will to do anything better.
CI is a fairly new thing. The idea of constantly doing all that compute work again and again was unfathomable not that long ago for most teams. We layer on and load in loads of ancillary processes, checks, lints, and so on, because we have the headroom. And then we reminisce about the days when we did a bi-monthly build on a "build box", forgetting how minimalist it actually was.