The popularity of SaaS was never derived from the products themselves, but rather business' weird aversion to doing in-house development. Most companies not in tech view software as literal magic, and act as if hiring some engineers could risk opening Pandora's box or something. Banks are particularly notorious for this; despite basically their entire business being done digitally, they treat software as a necessary evil, not as their underlying value.

But, the cost of in-house development just went down significantly. SaaS has always had a lot of broken promises. The thing is the software is never tailored to your use case, and you often have to integrate into your other tools anyway. And, you don't get to control the requirements, features, velocity, or bug fixes. Jira as a bug? Too bad I guess, hopefully it gets fixed eventually.

But the dirty secret is that companies are filled to the brim with bright-eyed aspirational employees, who want nothing more than to make their job easier and their company more efficient. The thing is they're doing it using cursed Excel workbooks on share drives. I think, in the near future, they'll be doing it with hand-rolled applications.

In comparison to some absurdist baseline maybe, actual software NEVER stops working under you, so in comparison something like an works 80% "most of the time" is godawful. Though I would argue that with SaaS the trend is toward 100% likelyhood to fuck your shit up given enough time, and it has borne out this way in the real world time and time again. SaaS is popular because it allows companies to more effectively extort you for your dollars.