What killed them was they never found PMF. Eventually the tech debt slowed them down so they couldn't take as many swings at finding PMF. But in the counterfac

What killed them was they never found PMF. Eventually the tech debt slowed them down so they couldn't take as many swings at finding PMF. But in the counterfactual if they'd tried really hard to avoid tech debt that would have slowed them down at the beginning, not to mention there are plenty of organizations that will write very complex abstract code to avoid tech debt, and end up making the code base incredibly painful to work with. So overall did get they get less swings? I've worked on a lot of old code bases and the biggest issues I've run into, issues that crippled development velocity, were 95% boneheaded decisions and overengineering. And never the types of code quality issues someone like Uncle Bob talks about in Clean Code.