My lament is more about the unrelenting desire to degrade software from being robust, well designed, and fit for the task, to fungible slop pouring out of a pipe from whoever is cheapest. In no other profession (architecture, construction, teaching, anything) would that mentality be tolerated.
The unnecessarily wasteful hardware is just one of the (ultimately more benign) side effects of that.
I think all of the areas you listed have the same desire pushed on them. Maybe even more so than in software. Being able to universally seek products or services that are not cost optimized is an extremely rare opportunity. Most everyone grapples with scarcity of some type before they grapple with not having the most robust and well fit option every time.
The unnecessarily wasteful hardware is just one of the (ultimately more benign) side effects of that.