[okamiueru]

As someone who's had to deal with a fair share of these types of sentiments, they have been, without exception, based on incompetence, and demonstrably wrong.

That isn't to say that there aren't cases where "just do the happy path" is actually sufficient, and the right thing to do. However, and bit overly simplified, but the non-happy-path is almost always the important parts of a system. It's the monitoring. Disaster recovery. Error handling and correction. Well thought out data models that prepare for future features, etc.