Which then immediately gets thrown into production and becomes the bedrock upon which further bad decisions are irreversibly built on every time, of course. Now the time pressure is even higher because people are actively complaining about the issues that cannot be solved with the hastily jerry rigged implementation ("should be simple right, just do..." is a bane of my existence).

This comment reminded me of something I read about laymen estimating the difficulty of technical problems. IIRC the two examples were:

a) Given a quality photograph, detect if it's of a bird.

b) For the same photograph, detect if it's taken in a national park.

The first problem may seem much easier if one does not know about EXIF geodata, assuming it's available in this scenario.

This is an inversion of the originating XKCD, which possible shows how far machine learning has come in the intervening years: https://xkcd.com/1425/

No, the first one is still much harder – and still seems easier to the layperson.