> So, is pile-of-if-statements the best we can do for business software?

I'm not sure if that's anywhere in the rating of quality of business software. Things that matter:

1. How fast can I or someone else change it next time to fulfill the next requirements?

2. How often does it fail?

3. How much money does the code save or generate by existing.

Good architecture can affect 1 and 2 in some circumstances but not every time and most likely not forever at the rate people are starting to produce LLM garbage code. At some point we'll just compile English directly into bytecode and so architecture will matter even less. And obviously #3 matters by far the most.

It's obviously a shame for whoever appreciates the actual art / craft of building software, but that isn't really a thing that matters in business software anyway, at least for the people paying our salaries (or to the users of the software).

Plenty of architecture to be found in well written text.