No, that's still making the assumption that all worthwhile solutions are balls of mud, leading to "freeze it in time" as the only sane option for preservation.

No, that's still making the assumption that all worthwhile solutions are balls of mud, leading to "freeze it in time" as the only sane option for preservation. That's cultural, not inherent to the technology. If every part of the stack is tiny and connected via common, documented protocols you have ample room for maintenance. That's easily validated by the Internet as a whole (and not the Web, which was burdened by its early design). A present-day "throw-away" that can do more than in the past is, more likely than not, leveraging a bigger and more decomposed software ecosystem, where bits of infrastructure can get remixed more readily. Pooh-poohing the results by saying "they solved a trivial problem" dismisses this underlying trend - tools and services that are currently "weekend hack" or "prototype only" have a habit of turning into tomorrow's "production-grade" if they gain substantial adoption. There's no particular reason we can't achieve Internet-scale maintainability for all problems, other than it taking time to build protocols of the right size/complexity for every problem domain.