Because companies are run by execs who only care about costs to deliver a product and DGAF about any of those things. I’ve seen this exact problem over and over. Usually it’s some “Growth Team” that is empowered by management to “pursue promising opportunities” and mostly consist of charming newbie execs, who propose wildly implausible changes that the engineering team does not have the patience to shoot down; or get tired of shooting down over and over again. So they try to circumvent it by trying these shenanigans.

It shouldn’t be surprising but it kinda shocks me how many American tech companies keep making these mistakes. The ones that avoid them seem to be ones whose execs have prior engineering background.