IRT the "software delay" thread:

I'm a software engineer at a mid to large sized software company and have noticed this "delay" in our own software.

One reason for this is that as any software company grows so does the size of the codebase. It becomes significantly more bloated, more inefficient, and harder to understand as the years go by and the engineers responsible for writing the original code leave the company or forget code they wrote in the past. Often you end building off of this old code or having to utilize parts of it as you build net new code which leads to the software getting slower and having more bugs. There's no way around this other than to rewrite old code or improve it and that doesn't happen in favor of writing net new code and creating new features.

The other reason is a shift away from an engineering focus to a more product focus when writing software. Our product managers run the show. Engineering has little to no say in what we work on so old code is never cleaned up, never optimized, never made more efficient. The company focus is new features all the time. They care about how it looks, not how it actually functions. From a user point of view the software looks shiny, new, friendly to use but performs terribly and breaks for little to no reason(at least from the user perspective). Our sales team sells new features that haven't been created yet so that way we can sign new clients and boost revenue without having actually delivered anything. This way, as far as our shareholders are concerned, "line go up" even though overall our product and service get worse.