long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.

Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?

I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.

People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.

All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.

You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.

That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc

We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.

AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.

We'll see how it goes.

I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?

Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.