The "other kind of fatigue" mentioned is that we have an overabundance of tools/interest in making ourselves more prolific, but a scarcity of tools/interest in

The "other kind of fatigue" mentioned is that we have an overabundance of tools/interest in making ourselves more prolific, but a scarcity of tools/interest in improving our code's quality. We chase immediate productivity at the expense of longer-term survival (and happiness). I agree with this sentiment, but the problem is barely tractable even at a small company working in a closed codebase. The thing about those disregarded edge cases, which OP uses to exemplify the quality problem, is that there's always an opposite edge! Your fix might be a bug for someone else. There was one particular beautiful, high-quality, generalized, and case-covering npm module, but those very facts about it made it unworkable in one past project of mine, which had strict requirements around footprint size. It's funny we use the word "ecosystem" to talk about this stuff. An interesting parallel is r/K-selection in ecology, where your species either favors nurturing a small few offspring, or churning out a big swarm and hoping that a few survive. Elephants vs. lemmings.