The article talks about long forgotten reasons why things are as they are.
I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.
I am from a earlier generation. Owned a TI SR-51A last year of High school, Then a HP-29c first year of University. I vaguely remember the SR-51A had an limited equation programming : multiply by a constant and add a constant. I remember writing sort routines for the 29c using its indirect register access to treat a block of registers as an array. Bench-marked various sorts. I think minutes to sort 20 items.
I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.
I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )
I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.