[jajko]

I am deep in one such corporate complexity, yet I constantly see an ocean of items that could have been in much simpler and more robust way.

Simple stuff had tons of long term advantages and benefits - its easy to ramp up new folks on it compared to some over-abstracted hypercomplex system because some lead dev wanted to try new shiny stuff for their cvs or out of boredom. Its easy to debug, migrate, evolve and just generally maintain, something pure devs often don't care much for unless they become more senior.

Complex optimizations are for sure required for extreme performance or massive public web but that's not the bulk of global IT work done out there.