[kirse]

It's a balance. There's also the saying that "the prototype usually becomes the product", which means that by the time the team has made all those tech debt mini-concessions along the way and have allowed engineers to sneak through pull-requests with zero discipline (it works just send it bro), they've basically sacrificed any sort of compound interest that could have been gained by teaching the team the correct fundamentals from the beginning.

There's a 6-month startup phase in just about every SW project I've led that sets a strong course for the lifetime of the project that is awfully hard to correct, both for better or for worse. My advice is always suck it up early and collect the dividends down the road.