My general suggestion for programmers trying to understand something strange or seemingly odd in the games industry is to check for an economic/value incentive

My general suggestion for programmers trying to understand something strange or seemingly odd in the games industry is to check for an economic/value incentive rather than a technical one. Unity has a lot of warts like your article indicates, but it gets a huge amount of bang/buck producing a not-big-budget multi-platform title with a multidisciplined team. I think that provides a lot of value for developers; so much that it outweighs the snags involved in Unity's technical shortcomings. Unity's roadmap is probably about expanding shipability for smaller developers and why Unreal is trying to commoditize that with Godot.