[evouga]

It's not so easy for several reasons:

1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture capitalists.

2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software. You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics, etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the place aren't your employees.