I agree with what you're saying about how the greedy approach to covering all your cases isn't usually optimal, but if a manager tells me that their rat's nest

I agree with what you're saying about how the greedy approach to covering all your cases isn't usually optimal, but if a manager tells me that their rat's nest of a 30-year-old enterprise software codebase is an outcome comparable to the decades of research put into matrix multiplication algorithms, I'm going to assume that department is bonkers until proven otherwise. Often these systems grow according to that greedy approach, sprouting a feature here and there as sales tells the team to add things, and then you're left with a system that was more grown than designed.