I'm the author. You are exactly correct. Everything was so heavily interwoven that it was impossible to tell what would happen downstream without making an edit and then tracking the changes through dozens of steps through the architecture diagram.
In this situation I’d make a second copy of a bad thing and then try to make the copy good, instead of changing anything in place. But yeah, I totally get the huge upstream fight it must be and I’m not trying to backseat drive… just marveling at how the organizational fuckups & constraints make it hard to fix obvious problems
You're right. I actually did propose this, but the other difficulty is getting stuff put onto the Jira board. My belief, yet to be verified, is that it was possible to deliver everything the executives promised AND perform the refactoring without any drop in service, but this would have required convincing management that a well-run team could 3x productivity. Eventually everyone got tired of talking to people that were just used to bad performance, so they couldn't envision smooth CI/CD and happy workers (as opposed to contented to get paid to hang around workers, which is what happy means in many cases).
