>>15889161
Such endeavors involve optimizing very specific problems for very specific hardware, at the cost of extensibility and maintainability. Vidya and useful programs these days involve an ever-expanding amount of layers between the hardware and the output. OS, drivers, and inside the program itself, all full of variables that are very difficult to optimize between and around. Modern computing demands generalization in hardware and in the problems software solves, and in practice those are the antithesis of optimization.
The most impressive demos on systems of yore involve serious self-modifying code and highly optimized routines for very specific, well-known and standard hardware. The limits of hardware were known, so there were known "impossibilities" to strive for, whether real or faked, seeking particular effects.
When optimizing for space, it involved arcane methods of encoding a ridiculous amount of data to be read in as many different ways as possible, sometimes by side-effects code has on hardware that isn't usually read. Execute it, it's the code. Read it one way, it's topology. Read it another way, it's color or graphics. Read it a third way, object movement info. Read it a fourth way, it's music. Read it a fifth way, it's plaintext. Read VRAM at a specific point in code execution, even more data.
You want to change any part of it? You have to plan for all of it. Probably by building a tool to build the demo. Now you need to not only know all the variables in advance, you need to accommodate for all the possible variables and make something cool happen in those parameters.
It's easier, faster and cheaper to get CS graduates and pajeets to slap something together because today's hardware's powerful enough for nearly every goddamned company to leverage it over optimization. Just use this stack of middleware with these libraries and this engine and build around all of their edge cases and inefficiencies.
You do get the occasional game or more general program out of the demoscene, but it's rare to see a whole project written to that standard.