> because of a long trajectory of lots of tradeoffs, some heavily related to the human, organisation, social side of software development - its hard to coordina

> because of a long trajectory of lots of tradeoffs, some heavily related to the human, organisation, social side of software development - its hard to coordinate an effort across probably dozens of teams. I agree with you on that, but hard ≠ impossible. I was fortunate to work in a couple of large companies with good technical management. The companies did OK even for large software with 10+ years of legacy C++ code. It indeed required significant effort to coordinate teams and people. But if you’re a technical lead in a software company, it’s exactly your job to accomplish that. If user wants to travel by a car and a company’s telling them “you can ride our awesome freight train instead”, it might mean the company has failed to manage the software development part of their business. It’s even possible the developers were top-notch professionals, but technical management wasn’t, and the management prevented developers from doing their job well.