Nothing about waterfall is obviously bad. It's how most engineering projects are done. Heck, it's how most projects generally in the world are done.
There's a reason it took a long time to move away from waterfall. It solves obvious problems and meshes with how the rest of corporations typically operate. In fact, with software delivery methods which were dominant back then, agile probably would have completely failed.
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In the end, I ended up reading the full piece. One doesn't get much more oblivious and buzzwordy than this:
> We are now more squarely in the age of Microservices, Mobile first, Polyglot, post-Java JVM languages, GitHub, Docker and the emergence of a world being eaten by Software.
How is this piece on the top of Hacker News? This piece reads like it was written by a marketing consultant with no idea what these terms actually mean or how software is actually built.