Yeah, welcome to enterprise development (regardless of programming language). Every VP fancies themselves as the next Steve Jobs and like to be uncompromising about delivering their vision. Which ironically ends up as design by committee when you have that many assholes in a room unwilling to back down but also needing to save face.
And to be fair, most of the premature optimization and bloated abstractions are just your architects sitting around bored for 6 months while the project sponsors argue over reporting minutiae (but won’t approve the designs until their pet features are pulled in on the roadmap). They know the entire feature list is going to get changed at the last minute as the political winds shift, so they’re designing an overbuilt architecture to CYA for whatever random bullshit someone will pull a week before a deadline.
And to be fair, most of the premature optimization and bloated abstractions are just your architects sitting around bored for 6 months while the project sponsors argue over reporting minutiae (but won’t approve the designs until their pet features are pulled in on the roadmap). They know the entire feature list is going to get changed at the last minute as the political winds shift, so they’re designing an overbuilt architecture to CYA for whatever random bullshit someone will pull a week before a deadline.