It would be a false dichotomy, if I meant to say that you must choose one of these paths. I suppose "it's easy to go too far in either direction" was not clear

It would be a false dichotomy, if I meant to say that you must choose one of these paths. I suppose "it's easy to go too far in either direction" was not clear enough. The argument I'm making is that the OP is creating a false dichotomy: that you must reject feature requests, or ruin the system. My point is that there are many, many developers who "relentlessly say no to feature requests that literally destroy the system to add some new feature" when the reality is that they do not want to put in the effort required to add the (meaningful) feature to the system. They are choosing system purity and laziness over delivering customer value, which requires more work in order to keep things simple.