That's like- the whole point. If you as a manager set a goal, those three choices are all the choices the people under you have to meet the goal, and you often set it up so that the preferred choice (actually make things better) is impossible. Its saying that decision makers need to be aware of this and adjust your behavior.
Like you said, if they don't, the people dealing with it have no choice- so, it'd be impossible to offer advice for those people, since they have no way of actioning it (unless its convincing the decision maker of that point)
JVM can run apps _compiled_ for it. WASM has the _exact same_ limitation.
Someone put in the effort to get Postgres to compile for WASM. That's great :) Maybe someday every application will compile to WASM as the preferred choice over the linux interface.
Compiling apps for different targets is VERY MUCH not a simple, low effort task though. Something like a database that must have an incredible number of optimizations in the way it makes syscalls, will have to a full stream of work to keep each target running well.
It can be done. But if "one of these thigns is not like the other" with your three things- Docker is the odd duck out.
It can run "anything" ... so long as someone has set up that project to correctly compile to a wasm target. "docker build" lets you build a package out of any software, without having to know much about it. "setting up a compiler for a new project, given the source code and maybe a separate toolchain for some other target that works", is a much more involved task.
There is no world where people are just grabbing an existing app and saying "hey, I'm gonna drop this into my wasm runtime real quick"
no, you're right. Terraform/Pulumi are much more focused on provisioning resources, while Ansible has its sweet spot in configuring a machine once its running.
It matters. The floor is how easy you are to replace. The ceiling is the marginal value that you provide to the company. Considering how incredibly high that marginal value is, there is a lot of upward pressure at the top of the scale.
That's... not true. I was in a unionized software development shop at L3 communications in Camden. It was... different. Having a published document showing how the "top performers" were going to get a 3.5% raise this year while the average people would only get 2.5% was odd. Counting my hours (including signing out for lunch and getting management approval for overtime) was very different. Getting paid overtime was nice!
The problem is that if I had stayed there for thirty years, I would have been pretty much guaranteed to make good money. By changing jobs a couple times, I made that same money in 2. So... people who are capable of getting better jobs and willing to risk change simply left, while people looking for stability or who had trouble getting jobs simply stayed. This didn't lead to the type of environment that I enjoyed working in. Your mileage may vary.
Like you said, if they don't, the people dealing with it have no choice- so, it'd be impossible to offer advice for those people, since they have no way of actioning it (unless its convincing the decision maker of that point)