Yeah that is what it boils down to often; the user doesn't care. It's more about what's best for the developer.
The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just for the sake of looking attractive.
And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it and do not want to work with it".
Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools and doing 'go build').
Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug reports and change requests, instead of new features.
Source: I've seen this happen a number of times.
Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly 200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5 years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that will work alongside or to replace me.
But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may change, idk.
Another factor here is employability. Employers go with the latest fad framework because they think it'll improve their ability to hire engineers in the short term. Unfortunately, this means that web developers need to always know the latest fad framework, whether they like it or not, or they won't get interviews let alone job offers.
The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just for the sake of looking attractive.
And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it and do not want to work with it".
Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools and doing 'go build').
Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug reports and change requests, instead of new features.
Source: I've seen this happen a number of times.
Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly 200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5 years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that will work alongside or to replace me.
But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may change, idk.