Something about my old CTO and VP of Eng I respected is they were still technical enough to call out this kind of thing. For as big as that company was they really held down complexity and overengineering to a real minimum.

Unfortunately the rest of the executive has leaned on them so hard about AI boosting productivity they aren’t able to avoid thst becoming a mess

It is a shame that so many companies try to scale by just hiring a lot of people, the more people you have in a single project the more overengineering you will end up with.

Some of it is consequence of managing so many individual contributors, I still believe a lot of companies use microservice stuff as a way to scale to more teams than to more scalability/reliability/observability.

Some of it is just people coming up with clever solutions (and leaving after the fact) and a lot from resume-driven development.

In other words they believed in principles other than increasing personal power