When it's too rotted, organizations plan to replace the whole system and pay 10x the price of what it would have cost to do it right in the first place, costly migration consulting mission, bullshit stuff and noise everywhere. The mid/long-term game is where the opportunity lies if you are a dev. The cycle is kind of safe for software engineer to me. Jus there won't be a place for HTML/CSS integrator, untalented PHP dev copy / pasting of random PHP function from SO anymore as it use to be 15 years ago. Those are cooked.
Well, until Claude Code ends the game(maybe in a few months), yeah. Today we're not there yet, even with full codebase knowledge. At least from my experience and how I want it to be done. For some, the damage has already been done. Wait & see !
I agree with your point about the funding process being oversimplified. However, I've seen many founders become emotionally attached to their MVP, convinced it's good enough to scale without fundamental rethinking.
They push forward with what's essentially a throwaway prototype instead of rebuilding it properly with lessons learned from initial user feedback. And some people are just cheap by nature. Last point is a huge one, even when funding is good enough. Does not make sense to make, I've seen it.
Agree on the test stuff. When talking to someone who can goes deep in details you mostly know that he's not a lier; then you have the trial period to fire him if he is.