[anonyfox]

Nowadays i come to my conclusion that "ease of maintenance" is the most important feature to have in a project. More critical is only that the project in itself is valuable enough, so many engineers optimize things that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Easy to maintain is not only about keeping something alive with minimal effort over longer periods of time. It also plays a pivotal role for scalability in any direction. Adding more engineers/teams, adding more unforseeable features, iterating quickly in general, surviving more traffic/load, removing technical bottlenecks, ... everything is so much easier when the project is easy to work with and maintainable.