Hmm, in the greater world of software project delivery, I actually see this as a problem of misaligned incentives. People will go ahead and make poor long-term

Hmm, in the greater world of software project delivery, I actually see this as a problem of misaligned incentives. People will go ahead and make poor long-term decisions that inflate technical debt and eventually cause product to die largely because they can disassociate themselves from bearing the consequences. You know, like moving on with their lives after the project goes into production and when the problems start emerging. I've seen this happen with many projects which I was part of. Managers telling me with a straight face that technical debt does not matter. Engineers caving to managerial fiat to ship features which the contract did not hammer down. All software system failures are human failures. If your company culture, leadership and processes can prevent this, kudos. :)