You are absolutely right about the short-sighted problems created by incompetent finance models. I've seen two successful approaches in practice. The first is

You are absolutely right about the short-sighted problems created by incompetent finance models. I've seen two successful approaches in practice. The first is vertically integrated companies using easily-measured labor-saving techniques like ML to justify the infrastructure costs required to support those innovations. And the second is places where workers have the institutional power to advocate for investment in the tools they have to use. It seems to me that there should be an effective strategy where we treat software as capital spending that gets appropriately depreciated, but mostly what I see is finance departments trying to micro-manage development and in the process costing their company a lot of money.