That is absolutely true. Unfortunately, this ship has sailed and we are not closing Pandora's box anymore. We'll have to adapt.

But we still hold good cards in hand.

Do they want their pile of steaming slop fixed, or not? Because no amount of complaints about the deadline being "yesterday" are going to change anything about the fact that time will be needed to fix the accrued technical debt, whether they like it or not.. And if AI dug you in that deep to start with, the solution is not to dig deeper.

I suspect some companies are going to find that out the hard (costly) way.