Back in Windows 98 days, it took a few seconds to load a screen of a native app sometimes. Now our computers are orders of magnitude faster, and webapps can still take a few seconds to load a screen. Progress?
The thing that hadn't changed is humans - it was and it's still acceptable for an application to take a second or another to load.
Technical details had changed, but I can't really judge if those changes were drastically innovative or we're just redoing the same shit over and over, and can't tell if world has gone better or worse. I guess such judgements are highly subjective.
Developer vs computer time trade-off works only when software already works reasonably well. Which is not the case.