In my experience it usually is actually bad. The bad parts are most often not tradeoffs, but rather over-engineered complexity that could have been simple and

In my experience it usually is actually bad. The bad parts are most often not tradeoffs, but rather over-engineered complexity that could have been simple and improved development speed at the time too. Usually the issue is developers thinking of a bunch of things they might want to add in the future and implementing abstractions to make adding those things easy. But, of course, 1 out of 10 of those things ever actually end up getting built, and another 9 that were never planned for do, so the whole thing is a disaster since it was designed for X, but ends up being Y. This is entirely avoidable and can't be described as the traditional speed for ugliness tradeoff.