A lot of the friction mentioned in the article revolves around tooling. Anyone with more that a few days in an engineering org will witness this. What is not mentioned is human friction. Over simplifying but an engineers job is to write code and push to main. Anything that gets in the way of that I categorize as friction.
> And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad...
I hope your peers ambivalence (educated guess here) towards your other responsibilities make your priorities obvious. Having been in a similar situation, I "lost" the corporate battle (was laid off) but as soon as I had kids I knew my priorities needed to change. I literally worked 8:30 - 5. That was it. I wasn't going to lose missing even the most mundane of times with my kids for some after hours "retro" or some early morning "pointing" session. Thats me tho, thats my deal.
I had a lot of success early on with a community of practice I started inside an engineering org but as time went on it morphed into a something different: A place to assign work outside an engineers day to day. I suppose thats a function of growth - people must always be working on something.
I started it with the intention of communicating architecture changes from consensus borne out of our weekly meeting. We got TypeScript into the codebase, React Query, talked about React Context and minimizing Redux. It was fun for a while. But then, was just another meeting where work was dolled out.
While maybe it does sum up our work culture it shouldn't influence how you work. Rarely have I seen someone who "runs faster" be more valued (monetarily or among senior peers) than someone who churns out quality and runs "a little slower".
Team is still very much a thing and if your team members are looking at each other as competition then that sounds like a culture thing, maybe the norm, still not acceptable.
Rounded corners really were all the rage for a while and we needed support for it! I remember in the early days cobbling together elements with top-left, top-right, etc image slices. Want't really too long ago.. maybe 10 years?