But Shopify's looks like all-out nuclear exchanges, while GitHub's looks like the souls are being ripped from every living being on Earth by a malevolent invader.

I'd say GitHub's is more apt.

The link you reference seems more like a faux paper texture? The OP ‘riso noise’ is over the top but it seems to be a new hype and tells me they have never seen a riso print in real life, nor worked with one. Riso machines/drivers have multiple print settings, “Screen Covered” (bitmap/halftone), “Grain Touch” (the noisy dither used here) and special solid modes for vector line/text iirc.

All the waste from this mass consumption is what makes "the globe" unhappy.

How do we solve the "waste" problem?

You can start with this: https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl I've built a few visualizations with it. You'd have to extend it a bit to copy exactly what Shopfiy did, but all the basics are there. It's probably also not as optimized as the Shopify implementation.

As someone who has worked in ecommerce for decades, Shopify is fantastic.

It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive. It's not as powerful as some systems, but it's not weak. It's not the easiest system to work with, but it's also not the hardest.

What it is is right in the goldilocks zone, and it allows businesses to DO BUSINESS, not end up having to worry about or even think about many decisions.

Day-to-day I work across 4 ecommerce platforms and Shopify is the one that doesn't keep anyone awake at night and "just works". Sure there's a ton more stuff some of the other platforms we use can do, but we also have a LOT more meetings, dev tickets and headaches with those platforms.

For like 80%+ of 0 to $50m+ online businesses it is by far the best choice because it means the team can focus on connecting with potential customers and selling stuff and not have to allocate nearly as much time or headspace to the Storefront system.

If you don't like them leeching money from small businesses, you'll hate the army of overworked support staff (formerly "gurus") who are constantly on the precipice of being downsized and asked to turn over calls faster to keep costs down.

Long time Shopify customer here. Their fees are not bad at all. Have you tried selling on Amazon, Ebay or even Apples App Store?

They even have a warehouse partner that packs and ships for about the same cost as DIY.

>seeing them as another vulture capitalist way of leeching money out of small businesses the globe over

How so? Nobody forces small businesses to use Shopify, they use it because it's a good product.