As soon as you gamify something, it ceases to be the same kind of problem it was in its original form. I can't say work was gamified, but it certainly feels closer to that considering the core ideas behind the NFT/crypto gamification craze.
Program-by-diagram works for some game engines, for example Unreal Engine storyboard. I'm fairly sure that current AI will run into an issue that plagues business requirements: meetings. It'll be an outlet that actually generates some MVP after the conversation.
College projects were full of these kinds of issues. You'd be part of a group where there's say four of you, one or two are trying to control the direction, the remaining two are looking at each other simply trying to understand what language the first two are speaking. After working for say the first iteration, everyone has a chance to prove themselves, work/responsibilities/design-input naturally shift towards or away from individuals.
To your point about the "mold" which society creates/accepts, this social aspect alone is likely the biggest factor. People aren't and can't break out of these social "holds" and what's ironic is that there's almost a financial/social/system level safety net built into most countries. It's socially irresponsible there?
If we had insight about why the restrictions were applied, it would likely be more alarming. But this response in particular is a product of desensitized, you can't argue that morals and views have shifted even if you were a mod at some point, especially now e.g. post-Covid, post-Trump.
If you're lucky enough to have someone buy into a centralized code/arch strategy then this is idea, the issues arrive when the code/arch strategy isn't a hard sell for the plow engineers.
As someone who can relate to the author in many ways, I'd argue you should consider stability more objectively. You compare states that have dissolved multiple times in a century against states that have been stable (relatively). Your own argument can be used to make the opposite point, judging by results alone.
Meta games like those you're referring to are not avoidable though, it's practically a social construct built on top of the game itself. Happens in just about any highly competitive field because of free "market" ideas.
Something about how Linux and Windows using different local times, Linux uses the hardware clock in UTC and then converts, Windows sets the hardware clock to "Local" time adjusted for daylight savings time (https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/533978/C-23plusWINDOWS...)
Everything I write in .NET eventually makes it to a Linux container, I'm not quite writing code in the same environment, but the only difference I've encountered so far is how DateTime works with UTC.