You’re not wrong. I’ve assumed it’s a side effect of the way the industry deals with career advancement. If you’re an engineer or middle manager, you aren’t going to get a promotion or bonus if you say “we took feature X and made it more stable without introducing any new functionality”. The industry seems to favor adding new features regardless of quality so the teams that do it can stand out and make it look like they’re innovating. This isn’t how it has to be: if companies would recognize that better doesn’t necessarily mean “more stuff” or “change”, then people could get rewarded for improving quality of what already exists.