What you're ignoring is that some significant percentage of that "bloat" is what leads to more rides and more money. All those tweaks and a/b tests and features

What you're ignoring is that some significant percentage of that "bloat" is what leads to more rides and more money. All those tweaks and a/b tests and features that solve problems for specific segments that most users won't ever see, getting shipped week after week, increasing the new user conversion rate by 0.5% here, reducing the rate of canceled trips by 0.3% there, it all adds up over time. Many of the features obviously fail too and don't improve anything they just add bloat, but you can't ever know for sure which features those will be in advance. In aggregate, the goal is obviously that it leads to the company making more money than was lost by paying all those engineers to move mountains to get around all the issues they hit up against. In the case of Uber, now a $96 billion public company and worth nearly double their 2016 valuation, it's a little ridiculous to call it a failure. You read this story and see an unmitigated disaster, but it's mostly just a picture of things working the way the company wants them to. The goal is to grow the company, not to have a nice, conceptually clean, tech-debt free codebase just for the sake of it.