There are a lot of similarities to the outsourcing boom a decade or two ago. Lots of small/cheap companies saw that they could hire an entire team of devs in another country for less than one US developer and jumped on it with high expectations but low process. Many of them didn't do anything to make it successful. They blindly hired the cheapest option they could find, gave them some vague requirements, and had very little ongoing technical review or oversight.

The process often went the way you're describing. Initial rapid success as prototypes got up and running quickly with the messiest code imaginable. But over time progress slowed more and more as tech debt and poor decisions created an increasingly large drag, eventually resulting in a stalled/dead project.

Maybe this time is different, but a lot of my early work was cleaning up projects that fit this pattern. I hope the new up and coming developers will get the same opportunity.