Until external forces turn these monoliths into heavy liabilities and block adaptability.
Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.
They still have to answer to the managers.
Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.
Eh, that's true just about everywhere... Code = Money.
You spend some money, get new and hopefully better code, and with some luck you will get a return on the investment, ie more money than you spent on doing it.
Unless you are doing it for fun. Or don't know what to do with all the money you have.
You misunderstood me.
That better code had a cost of 1 000 euros, due to the amount of hours spent on it.
How much profit did those euros spent on developer salary brought to the business revenue?
I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.
And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic