> Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. ... Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance.

> I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos, but not scroll web pages? How is that ok?

IMO the comparison should be buildings <-> fine-tuned libraries (i.e. video decoding algorithms), modern applications <-> cities.

Go to any city center in Europe. Urban planning a century ago was much more elegant and elaborate taking into consideration the city as a whole. Nowadays developers and investors often ignore important aspects, such as surrounding buildings, infrastructure, making cities inefficient for the people who actually live there.

Any system which has plenty of resources has to become inefficient. It's just that the Moore's law allows for pretty damn inefficiency.