I absolutely agree with the premise. People just love building things even when they're not needed. After a while, your ego gets attached to whatever it is you'

I absolutely agree with the premise. People just love building things even when they're not needed. After a while, your ego gets attached to whatever it is you've built and you can't let it go. I remember working at one place where somebody built a new framework to solve a common problem we all had. He pitched it to all the other devs in a meeting and I remember being confused about it because there was a standard framework that solved the problem already and did it in much simpler and more elegant way. (To be fair to him, this standard functionality was only recently introduced.) During his presentation, I asked why the standard solution wouldn't work for him. It turns out he wasn't familiar with it. Fair enough, so later I messaged him and showed him the standard way to do it and how much simpler it was. He couldn't be swayed. He just couldn't accept that his complicated solution wasn't necessary. He constructed scenarios where his idea was needed, even though I saw solutions to those scenarios using the standard framework. Interestingly enough, one of the scenarios where his custom thing was needed was in some tests he had written where he did some complicated things to set things up. I looked at the tests and even there saw those complicated things weren't necessary! There were ways to simplify what he was doing so that the tests were better written and didn't need his custom tool. Anyway, he wouldn't be convinced. And because he couldn't be convinced, we got stuck with his solution and saw people continue to work on it, add more functionality to it, fix bugs, etc. All of that work was just a waste of time when we could've relied on a standard solution, which was way more mature and way simpler. All of this drove me crazy, but I realized that sometimes people are just unable to see simple solutions to problems. Worse, having one complex solution begets more complex solutions elsewhere.