I'm basing my opinion on reading the article. The claims that were made are consistent with what I've experienced working with folk with relatively limited soft

I'm basing my opinion on reading the article. The claims that were made are consistent with what I've experienced working with folk with relatively limited software engineering skill. I don't think that's an unfair or mean thing to say. The whole premise of the article is to try and convince me that not following best practices can be a good thing. To me, the article seemingly reads as defensive, as if the author is actually trying to convince themselves or their coworkers that they aren't to blame for an accumulated decade of technical debt. In reality, there's no blame to assign when tackling tech debt. Real projects are messy. Folk defer work for short term gains at the cost to their future self. Growing tech debt is just an eventual engineering problem to tackle like anything else. Best practices are distilled wisdom intended to keep those sorts of problems from growing out of control. Re: the competency of the SO core devs, they very well could and probably are solid within their domain. Not knowing anything about them though, I think it's possible that they're a bit siloed off in their knowledge. If a lot of their core team were there from the beginning of the project and were relatively inexperienced at the time, they may not have ever invested their time into developing test tooling. In some ways it's very impressive that they're able to keep that large of a project going with so little testing infrastructure.