It's the result of people getting creative to save money. This kind of thing happens in all industries if it goes unchecked. Not that I particularly advocate

It's the result of people getting creative to save money. This kind of thing happens in all industries if it goes unchecked. Not that I particularly advocate for it but in other disciplines regulation, unions and certification bodies and similar structures collectively put the brakes on things like this. In software it's the wild west. The hypocrisy of the modern software management is that they demand the outcome of a precise engineering effort but they don't want to pay the bill for such an effort. So you end up creating this environment and culture that kind of on the surface pretends to be science and engineering but in practice zero effort is put into stuff beyond "now it works". In other disciplines, say if you want to build a bridge, you can't put an ad on Upwork and be like "budget is tight ... just modify this existing bridge plugin ... shouldn't take more than a few hours". In software this is the norm, not the exception.