The real cost of constantly having to firefight: people will inevitably leave or demand a higher pay to stick around. No one wants to be the one wasting 3 hours

The real cost of constantly having to firefight: people will inevitably leave or demand a higher pay to stick around. No one wants to be the one wasting 3 hours because a design pattern was poorly / wrongly implemented, or doesn't realize they need to downcast what is essentially a data object, or whatever gotcha the people making it before decided to implement. It doesn't help further one's career. It feels bad, like a dead end. You're always far behind the curve, and you always feel like a third class citizen behind the whims of management. It goes directly against why most ambitious software devs became a software dev in the first place.