I worked with such a person, briefly. It seems he had never heard the phrase "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line". He had plans for the product stretching out 5 years, and architected accordingly. He knew exactly why each piece was done the way it was done, and could hold it all in his head. But when he was reassigned to a different project after 6 months, the rest of us had to pick up the pieces.

The general problem is that it is hard to estimate the amount of changes needed in the future. You have to make a guess. Sometimes this leads to over-engineering. Sometimes it leads to under-engineering. Depends on the case, the future, and the skill of the engineer.

My favorite designs are the ones that can't even solve current problems, much less anything that might need to change later, because they spent so much time optimizing for non-existent future scenarios that the present ones suffer.

"Sure, our web application might take a minimum of two seconds to handle trivial get requests, and logging in doesn't work half the time, but say the word and I can instantly migrate from Postgres to MySQL."

That's a good example, preparing for a future which probably never comes.

It is not easy to predict the future of a software application. In Louisiana they were building levees to withstand a once in 100 years flood or something like that. Based on historical weather reports they are able to estimate how high and strong the levees would need to be. But with software it is hard to see how we could estimate what kinds of requirement-changes might be needed during the next 100 years for any application.