Software today is not as "soft" as one would've hoped, fifty years ago. It's not malleable. It's not composable. It's barely reactive.
This is not how it was meant to be.
That's not to suggest it'd take more than half a day to knock something together, but that's more down to the awesome ecosystem of software libraries than it being a simple project. To write an app from scratch in, say, C++ would be a huge project.
That would seem to be the point the OP is making.
I'm sure it would be relatively incidental for the majority of HN readers to cobble something together that fulfils this sort of functionality without much work. If your complaint is that languages don't form higher abstractions of things like 'thumbnails', I think that is just due to us collectively preferring the flexibility of lower level code - it's certainly not because it would be difficult to create a language with such abstractions.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=software&year_...
If you want a web site that allows you to create your own personal grid of thumbnails for a list of links (from a URL), that is something that can be built with software (with relative ease). If this particular developer created that tool, the considerations would certainly elevate rapidly - now it's useful to a lot more people, so you need to provide hosting for your larger audience. Instead of a novelty, you've created a burden on your resources. Particularly if they want a "live" grid of thumbnails, and thus it updates "constantly", the resource costs could quickly become staggering.
What are reasonable expectations for software, and if they are not being met, what is the roadblock? What exactly were the predictions and hopes for software in the late 60s?
A relatively average user can use WYSIWYG editors (including word processors, web editors, and apps that provide text, photo and video editing at your fingertips.) What else should they be able to do?
Are we merely discontent with the rate of progress? People who are not in the line of work of home automation are able to purchase hardware and configure it in their homes. People can buy inexpensive, versatile computer chips off the shelf and program them to be unique devices, meeting specific needs. We can already imagine, predict and hope for a future where the functionality of a web site or device is wildly configurable to the individual. What metrics do we have to reach before we're satisfied?
I recollect a conversation I had with a recruiter around 12 years back. He was predicting that a day will come when a "manager" can drag and drop objects and create any kind of software application. That day has not come and it will not come.
I bet the whole thing could be done with a couple lines of JS.
What does require real dev work and infrastructure is prerendering the web page screen shots and serving them up.