You're looking in the wrong place. It's a sort of survivorship bias. You might not have worked on an individual project where technical reasons were the root

You're looking in the wrong place. It's a sort of survivorship bias. You might not have worked on an individual project where technical reasons were the root cause of failure, but I've seen many projects not happen at all because changing a badly engineered platform was deemed too risky or too expensive, or just couldn't get scheduled because another project - made slower by poor past engineering decisions, but important enough to go ahead anyway - was occupying the team's time. Focusing on projects and not on platforms and products creates these blinkers.