I worked at a startup where we had to make a lot of compromises. The (non technical) founders could not get enough funding at the beginning, so they had to constantly raise small amounts to survive the next few months.
We had to grow fast and prove that we had a market fit. This meant making compromises, but the technical debt was actually under control. We knew what to improve and how to do it once we had enough resources.
Eventually we proved ourselves and got decent funding and could hire more developers. We were looking forward to improving our system.
Unfortunately the new guys (many fresh out of college, lead by a few "FAANG"-ish seniors) decided that the technical debt was a proof of our incompetence and convinced the leadership that they needed to take over the technical development and rewrite everything. The result was a year where no major features were added and we lost our momentum. The funding dried up and the company had to let go 2/3 of the employees.
The worst part was that the new systems were more complicated to extend due to their clever "scalable design" (distributed monolith) with more micro services than developers. When the rewrite was done and it was time to add the new features, they had lost the trust of the leadership and just threw code at it in desperation to get things done as quickly as possible. I pithy the developers that inherited the result... By that time the rock stars had moved on and are inflicting damage elsewhere after touring conferences where they presented their greatness.
One of the most important skills a person can have is to assess a situation, understand the actual context and constraints and build something based on this information. It sounds to me your team worked this way. You were playing within the given constraints.
Exactly the opposite of the one trick pony’s who just mindlessly apply what they learned or think is cool with a total disregard for context.
We had to grow fast and prove that we had a market fit. This meant making compromises, but the technical debt was actually under control. We knew what to improve and how to do it once we had enough resources.
Eventually we proved ourselves and got decent funding and could hire more developers. We were looking forward to improving our system.
Unfortunately the new guys (many fresh out of college, lead by a few "FAANG"-ish seniors) decided that the technical debt was a proof of our incompetence and convinced the leadership that they needed to take over the technical development and rewrite everything. The result was a year where no major features were added and we lost our momentum. The funding dried up and the company had to let go 2/3 of the employees.
The worst part was that the new systems were more complicated to extend due to their clever "scalable design" (distributed monolith) with more micro services than developers. When the rewrite was done and it was time to add the new features, they had lost the trust of the leadership and just threw code at it in desperation to get things done as quickly as possible. I pithy the developers that inherited the result... By that time the rock stars had moved on and are inflicting damage elsewhere after touring conferences where they presented their greatness.