I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for

I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. As for mature markets - useless and/or broken buildings happen all the time. Sometimes this is because a starchitect is good at making buildings that look incredible but bad at making buildings that don't have problems. (Calatrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, many more.) Sometimes it's because the project is extractive and the goal is money at the expense of quality - or even usability. (Many housing estates and not a few McMansions.) Both of these are different to a tech co hiring the equivalent of a minor starchitect to Make A Thing Happen, but getting something non-performant and/or impossible to maintain. The difference is that unless it's a greenfield startup Thing is likely to be easy to define and its performance should be easy to measure objectively with simple metrics like uptime, throughput, and so on.