For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it...
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.
And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.
Can't divulge too many details, but one example was when we had 2 options for solving a problem: 1. The "easy" way, storing a bunch small blobs to s3 as a job was running on an embedded device, or 2. The slightly tricky, implement streaming of said data on the device (not as easy as it sounds).
We went with option 1, the easy one, because it was deemed faster bang for the buck. I did some basic math showing that the bandwidth required upload the high number of blobs to s3 within our time budget was not possible on our uplink.
After we spend a month failing on 1., it was clear that we hit the predicted problem. Eventuelly we implement option 2.
Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)
Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don't listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.
A popular (and wise) saying is that "Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings". I think the same is true for basic math. "Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation".
You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.
There is a dangerously large population of devs and managers that look at themselves, unironically, as the gigachads pumping out ui "upgrades"
Many of these fail to realize how disruptive it is. UI change is like API breakage for the brain.
I have lost track of how many times I've tried to help an elderly family member with an app after some pointless, trivial, ui change. Only ending with them entirely giving up on using the app after the "upgrade" because the cognitive overhead of the change is beyond the skill that can fairly be expected for them 💔
Depending on your needs you can also break it into a columnar format with some standard compression on top. This allows you to search individual fields without looking at the rest.
It also compress exceptionally well, and "rare" fields will be null in most records, so run length encoding will compress them to near zero
See fx parquet
Postgres and MySQL/mariadb are all primarily written in C.
Contrary to what other posters here claim, most programming languages are not written in C, but are self hosted. Ie. written using themselves. This usually involves a small bootstrapping component written in C or something similar, but that is a minor part of a whole
X11 is "complete" in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.
At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.
Was it too early? I don't know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.