Years ago, before the Internet, software was expected to be rather buggy. It took a long time to research and fix. Releasing software was expensive, you had to put it on physical media and ship it. QA was critical role, it was way less expensive to test the hell out it and fix it than it was to ship new code. The idea that computers could be trusted to perform tasks well was easily shattered when things went wrong, and the additional optics of losing customer trust went a long way into driving QA.

Fast forward to today, and it's way cheaper to ship code with bugs to prove out an idea works than it is to spend even a few minutes writing test cases and doing even a modicum of QA.

Ultimately, it's a not just a combination of all 3 things you've mentioned, which are all contributing factors; the real problem is any level of QA before proving an idea is seen as a waste of time and money. As someone who started in tech support & QA 30 years ago, it's really tough to see.

It just seems like the idea its actually cheaper to ship broken code than invest in QA is, well, wrong.

And I'm just thinking about the amount of time people spend paying me to work through these bugs with the team at the startup building it.

Putting aside the whole "it's easier to keep a customer than it is to acquire one" and "easier to keep your good reputation that overcome a bad one" side of things (and there is one tool a client asked me to use that I told them either the tool goes or I do),

What’s mind blowing to me is not the tiny startups, but the megacorps like Microsoft putting out mission-critical cloud infrastructure code that’s just plain broken.

A recent one was that Azure Backup and Azure Update don’t work in combination! If you restore a VM, it can never again be patched by the update system. (It won’t recognise the OS as supported and just refuses to do anything.)

It has been reported, but nobody cares. I was told by support that this is a “will not fix” because it’s not a requirement.

There is no way anything this catastrophically bad would have made it past QA back when Microsoft used to have an actual QA team.

I swear there is a significant portion of development teams out there that are secretly pleased as punch that they can just push whatever garbage they want straight to production without the pesky people in QA “just complaining” and being “obstructionist”.