All the technologies you mentioned do undergo large component rewrites and refactoring very often. It's true that e.g. the JVM is sometimes hemmed in by decisio

All the technologies you mentioned do undergo large component rewrites and refactoring very often. It's true that e.g. the JVM is sometimes hemmed in by decisions from the past. But it is a decades old project and it is not clear that more up front design and deliberation would have future proofed the project for the language and VM conventions of the 2020s. I have applied incremental design to concurrent applications and a compiler + stack VM project that runs in embedded environments. You don't go in blind. You do need domain experience and broad strokes knowledge of the conventions. You make some major architectural decisions up front but these don't involve much planning or design. Contrary to your point about CRUD apps, API design is harder to achieve incrementally since it is an interface and requires cross-team (sometimes cross-organizational) iteration. It's still possible, but your organization needs to be equipped for incremental/agile work.