To some degree you are right, but the sign of good quality code with low technical debt is the ability to change requirements quickly, not necessarily consider

To some degree you are right, but the sign of good quality code with low technical debt is the ability to change requirements quickly, not necessarily consider future requirements. In my opinion, investing early on in CI/CD pays so much more than thinking about code quality, correct abstractions and future requirements. If I have a fast deployment strategy with automated testing I can trust, accommodating new features is a breeze regardless of the underlying code quality. Of course though it's all a balancing act. I could spend a year building a solution using sophisticated tools like spinnaker, only to completely miss the market at a startup. Still, if there is a tradeoff to be made between code quality and CI/CD, I'd always side with CI/CD.