Yeah, exactly the same in my experience too. In fact, the biggest software atrocities I ever saw were team-based, with people having different opinions and wan

Yeah, exactly the same in my experience too. In fact, the biggest software atrocities I ever saw were team-based, with people having different opinions and wanting to modify the architecture every six months. And getting away with it because there was no vision. This is where a good team lead or technical lead, or even Fred Brooks' "Surgical team", or your example of "single developer and contributors": have one person with the vision making the difficult architectural decisions and you'll get some conceptual integrity. What I see a lot is people with little experience who learned things one way and become unable to understand or respect working code and want to change everything purely for personal preference. Maybe this is where the bias against lone developer code comes from.