It "works" only on a certain timescale. We don't have sufficient incentives and penalties to make things fail quickly. A relevant example in the tech world is data breaches. If data breaches resulted in a thorough public audit and financial/criminal penalties for the managers who pushed for speed over safety, they would no longer "work".

> If standards mean imposing big constraints on development, nobody will pay attention to them.

Unless there are penalties for not doing so.

> tech has moved too fast for anyone to actually be able to credibly say how things should be done for longer than a year or two

But that's just it. If things are moving so fast that you can't say how things should be done, then that tells you that the first thing that should be done is to slow everything way down.