A lot could be said. If there's a mistake, it was the economy not providing sufficient resources to solve this problem well. There was certainly awareness of this topic and some attempts to address it (for example North, Stephen C. "Incremental layout in DynaDAG." International Symposium on Graph Drawing, Berlin Heidelberg, 1995, or North, Stephen C., and Gordon Woodhull. "Online hierarchical graph drawing." Graph Drawing: 9th International Symposium, GD 2001 Vienna, Austria, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002.
Successful systems like Tom Sawyer Software or yWorks have dynamic or incremental layout features. The market of course strongly rewarded work on interactive systems like Visio that were well integrated into larger platforms.
Not sure who remembers but high performance incremental constraint-based layout was one of the computer science lights that failed in the 1980s and 90s but with so many fundamental advances in technology (processors, algorithms, solvers, software platforms) and new emphasis on language-based approaches (in part due to LLMs) there might be a better opportunity now.
Anyway it's a hard problem, it's not as if nobody was aware of it.
Successful systems like Tom Sawyer Software or yWorks have dynamic or incremental layout features. The market of course strongly rewarded work on interactive systems like Visio that were well integrated into larger platforms.
Not sure who remembers but high performance incremental constraint-based layout was one of the computer science lights that failed in the 1980s and 90s but with so many fundamental advances in technology (processors, algorithms, solvers, software platforms) and new emphasis on language-based approaches (in part due to LLMs) there might be a better opportunity now.
Anyway it's a hard problem, it's not as if nobody was aware of it.