[austin-cheney]

Incidentally becoming the single point of failure isn't the problem. The problem is an ethics violation of intentionally positioning yourself before the cost and maintenance considerations of the application.

If, in your example, you become the single point of failure because nobody else wants to engage in modern practices to increase the durability of the application then its a management problem. The way to think about that is: that by changing direction are you reducing time and cost of delivery? If so you have become that single point of failure by pushing for greater ethical considerations.

Beware though, everybody especially people who are ethically wrong, will claim their way is better. The differentiator is measurements: speed of delivery, speed of refactor, degree of risk, speed of labor, quantity of dependencies, compile time, load time, and so on.