Yeah, and a lot of that software sucks because the companies who pay for it to be developed want the cheapest possible thing that just about works and not some

Yeah, and a lot of that software sucks because the companies who pay for it to be developed want the cheapest possible thing that just about works and not some ultra-engineered unkillable concrete bunker of an app that costs them 50x more. That was the entire point of the agile revolution - get rid of waterfall methods inherited from classical physical engineering and switch to constant iteration and shipping, with fixes to not-quite-right work being done whilst workers are in the building. Software engineering became less like regular engineering because that's what the customers wanted, and who's to say they were wrong?