It could be random and it will still work. You want to pay a few people fairly so the others fight with them for that positions. Workers fighting workers is the goal of this incentives, it had nothing too do with performance.
> However, no one person owned the architecture or design. The experienced developers did drive this.
The lack of formality does not mean a lack of the role. If "experienced developers" are the ones doing the design. They are de-facto architects.
> No mentions of microservices, serverless architecture, application boundaries, event-driven architecture, and the lot. Some of these did come up during brainstormings. However, there was no need to reference them in the design documents themselves.
So, the teams were thinking in patterns to discuss and express themselves. But, then decided to hide that and do not show the reasoning in the documentation, for reasons. That makes the job of understanding the conclusions of the discussion harder for people from outside their group.
I am all for transparency. If your company has architects but calls them "experienced engineers". If you use patterns and then remove them from your documentation. Your company is going to lack the transparency to allow everybody to participate.
Everybody has seen this with on-line rants. People raises and falls by politics. When they are one of the "expert engineers" they talk about cool company and meritocracy. When politics make them fall, then there comes a rant and how now the company "is not at it used to be".
I like to spend my time doing software engineering instead of politics and gaining upper management favor or fighting peers. Clear responsibilities help with that when a company is big enough. Like any system, a quantitative change - number of employees - may lead to a qualitative change that needs a change of approach. To try to run a 1000 people company like a 50 people startup is like trying to design in the same way a small server with a few queries per minute and a critical server with thousands of queries per second.
It's not that true for Western countries after the 2008 financial crisis? It seems to not have stopped housing bubbles.