The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries—dependencies—of unknown provenance.
Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.
As an engineer: because the vast majority of jobs simply never give you enough time to design or build a thing in an optimal, minimalistic fashion, and you’ll never get a chance to meaningfully improve it because “that’s tech debt” and there will always be something more important.