I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.
Yes, this is well put. I was heavily influenced by Casey back in 2014 and the advice I give juniors now is always that first point about "getting the clowns out of the car". There's a lot of crossover with the "grug brained developer" here too, which is much more aligned with the web/enterprise world.
I find it very hard to convince people though. It runs counter to a lot of other practices in the industry, and the resulting code seems less sophisticated than an abstraction pile.
Interesting take, and there is some truth to the "practical vs ideological" split, but I feel like it's a bit mixed up here.
The actual division I see is between programmers arguing for simpler, more direct solutions to problems (e.g see Casey's blog post on semantic compression, or the hype around HTMX) and those who want to architect the "perfect" scalable and extensible system. The latter is much more common in enterprise settings, usually performs worse, and is the source of a lot of incidental complexity.
The article mentions microservices and event driven systems as an example of "pure engineering", but I think it's the exact opposite. I always see the "pure" crowd advocating for single binaries, fewer dependencies, fewer network hops, and less future-proofing.