Absolutely, capitalism creates perverse incentives here because the goal is to spend as little effort as possible in order to produce a product that’s just good enough to be viable. I’ve had the exact same experience working on projects where delivering features was the only thing business people cared about, and refactoring never happened.

And that’s a good observation that it’s a similar dynamic to evolution where things just grow out of existing working components in organic fashion instead of getting redesigned to properly address new requirements.