Software development has become so ubiquitous and lucrative that it attracts folks who are heavily motivated to find some reason to exist in the org structure,

Software development has become so ubiquitous and lucrative that it attracts folks who are heavily motivated to find some reason to exist in the org structure, regardless of whether or not that's good for the product. The number of TPMs and co-PMs (both Product and Project varietals) has exploded. There are now "group program managers" and of course all of these no-hard-product-artifact roles have formed hierarchies, so it's now possible to be a senior technical program manager managing other technical program mangers, the real work-product of which is purely additional meetings. Sub-par software engineers now have tons of places in the org structure where they can move laterally to maintain a place in tech - usually by inserting themselves between technical groups. Thus, the ratio of people-who-can-produce-something-in-the-product to people-who-mostly-use-email-jira-slack-and-${videoconf} has plummeted. Any non-trivial engineering product requires organizational members, but there's administrative bloat in tech to rival academia. I suspect that many of the egregiously bad examples here are, rather than the product of a small team of terrible engineers, actually the product of several large teams of engineers being mediated by pseudo-technical people lodged in bureaucratic seams. That's how the worst software I've personally seen has been produced.