I don't think it not being that harms it as much as people think. It has to require updates for everything either way, people by and large don't care about "oh

I don't think it not being that harms it as much as people think. It has to require updates for everything either way, people by and large don't care about "oh but it's only a small total breakage, going to jump on that then". On the other hand, yes, there certainly was some "we break everything anyways, so lets 'improve' things", combined with those improvements being designed at the wrong time, with assumptions that not always turned out to match reality. (E.g. a bunch of pieces that were added to IPv6 kind of assumed that routers would stay as they were, with routing done on CPUs, in software. Which they obviously didn't, and specialized hardware works on entirely different constraints)