I think it's not so much that people like complexity itself, but it's a result of punting on decisions and failure to make tradeoffs and design decisions. Inst

I think it's not so much that people like complexity itself, but it's a result of punting on decisions and failure to make tradeoffs and design decisions. Instead of writing something that does one thing and does it well, people write something that can run in four different modes, and is configurable via a yaml file, and can load plugins to change the behavior, and isn't a finished/standalone product but a "framework" that can be configured into a product... A lot of it just comes from punting on bulletproof designs too, like some code that works 99% of the time, but every now and then it fails due to some problem like a race condition or a deadlock. So... instead of fixing it, someone wraps that layer with something that will retry N times, and N is configurable, and then every now and then it fails N times in a row so even with the retries it fails, and then people are like "we should increase the N configuration parameter!", and then other times it just sits there retrying all day and people want to know why it's stuck, turns out its still retrying "oh no, we should decrease N, so it fails early and someone can fix it, and we should add monitoring and telemetry and alerting so we can see when its in a retry loop!" In this scenario, there is no good value for N, so it just shouldn't exist, the right answer is to fix race condition/deadlock so it just works every time.