[Bartweiss]

I think this is the better insight.

A lot of DailyWTF posts are about people not knowing a function existed and then reimplementing it horribly. Many of them include a note like "the other 10,000 lines were similar".

Ignorance is not embarrassing, it's the default state when all of our tools grow and change daily. But a lot of the worst wtf moments are clearly cases where something wasn't sanity checked by anyone until it was presented as a finished product - sometimes too late to keep out of production. That's the benefit of frequent commits, reviews, and research breaks; they might not prevent our ignorance, but they keep it under control.