That should be one of those Tech culture “laws.”
I suspect that the dependapocalyse is a significant factor. When every part of an operation has multiple context rebuilds, and resources are not shared across module boundaries, you get inefficient behavior.
But I’m skeptical that there’s a will to rethink that.
We already have something:
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
Milton Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo
I feel that there is a bit of a difference, though, because that’s really a cynical (and probably accurate) observation on the behavior of bureaucracy, and I feel the temporary fix thing is of a “finer granularity,” and applies to basic human nature.
The root of the problem is much more deeply ingrained in our economic system.
Sometimes when some janky p.o.s. solution works well enough, it truly is good enough.
I have known a lot of extremely talented developers, some with more technical skill than me, that simply failed at their job because they couldn’t come to terms with the fact that their job isn’t to produce the most perfect code possible for the problem.
Shipping is very important, sometimes more important than what you ship :)