I get your drift, mostly, but I'd say accidental complexity comes from forces more powerful than technical geekery: money. I work at a fairly well known startu

I get your drift, mostly, but I'd say accidental complexity comes from forces more powerful than technical geekery: money. I work at a fairly well known startup that has raised many tens of millions from VCs. Having raised this money we are now fully expected to hit quarterly numbers. In this pursuit we often end up adding random shit to the product or doing extra non-core shit to get a deal done. Product roadmap be damned. Unless you have a principled and powerful (dictatorial, even) leader who can say "no, we should stick to our vision rather than introduce new tech debt" and enforce it through product and engineering, the accidental complexity will continue to pile on as selfish quota-carriers eat up all resources available to them.