Is it me, or are the current crop of .com clowns even more clueless than the '99ers?
No. I blame Paul Graham and web programming being where people learn to program now. Graham encourages kids to start with "I want to found a startup, all the cool hackers drop out and found startups[1][2][3][4]" and then as an afterthought try to come up with a product, so the startup scene looks like that software engineering class every CS student takes where you have to come up with some product, any product, and then implement it. Except there's a ton of money involved. Then, because they've been reading blogs by web guys their whole short career, they truly believe that the right way to build something is to throw something together as quickly as possible and only think very hard about things when they break. Don't fear failure right? The thing is, that only works if you really know what you're doing, so your "throw something together" will be more right than wrong. The whole Silicon Valley scene downright encourages half-baked ideas with shoddy implementations, with a shiny layer of design porn thrown on top in the hopes you don't notice.
I agree with bfv's comment from a engineering perspective, but PG's also made the comment that the reason the tech world's insanity works is because of the economics of it right now. The startups that go on to succeed tend to generate > 100x return on investment. So at the moment, it pays to keep churning out lots of companies with little attention to software quality or security. As long as 1/30 of them succeed, they can brush the failures under the rug.
But that was the whole problem back in '99: all these companies generated "value" without actually generating "profit." The economics "right then" was that people with no understanding of tech were swapping tech stocks with each other on the assumption that they would somehow magically generate money at some point in the future therefore they were valuable NOW. Imgur has like a quarter billion dollar valuation. Do you see Imgur returning a quarter billion dollars to anyone?
Oh believe me, I'm waiting for the day when it all collapses. And there's plenty of companies that fall into your description. But I'm saying that the 1 dropbox that makes a billion dollars pays for all the crap ideas that turn into bootstrap-covered-node-js-designed-docker-contained vaporware.