I've seen numerous places trying to hire someone to fix a 5-10 year mudball that has reached a point where progress is no longer possible without breaking something else which breaks something else and so on.

There is an endgame to the mudball and it does end in complete and total development stopping and systems that are constantly going offline and take weeks to get restarted. Most of the time the place will say: "Oh we've already had several consultants tell us the same thing" The same thing being the situation is hopeless and they are facing years of simply untangling the mess they made.

Usually the mudball is held together by a chain of increasingly shorter senior positions that keep jumping the sinking ship faster and faster. Finally they can no longer convince anyone sane to take on the ticking time bomb they have created and they turn to consultants.

Also my advice is often you should bring back person X that was at least familiar with the system at whatever salary they require. I am inevitably told that that person will literally not even take calls or emails from the company any more, every time. Thats how bad a real world mudball is.

It's not just about the craft. It's about understability, explainability and accountability.

This is similar to the rage from 2010-2022 when developers, often at the behest of their employers, enthusiastically promoted the idea than everyone needs to learn how to code.

But an artist who values the end result over the craft is hardly an artist at all. They're a merchant at heart. The art is the product, and what excites them is shipping product.

For an artist at heart, however, the process is the product. Lucky for them, its about to become a lot more valuable.

Doesn't this analysis assume that the 2017 administration expected to lose the 2020 election?

I'm genuinely curious. What would have happened if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election? Do you think that the 2022 changes would still have come into effect, or do you think there would have been an effort to change them?