Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.
Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.
Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.
Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.
I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.
I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.
Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.
Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.
Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.
The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).
So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.
In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.
Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.
Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.
Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.
From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?
And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.
All the incentives are wrong.