> All code is bad. Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

from: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

I haven't gone through this yet- but my understanding is that there are some examples of this here "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" [1].

[1] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

You are comparing the perfect against the good while Fowler is likely comparing the good against the bad.

Taking an extra week or two to clean up bad design decisions early in a project can pay dividends in the future.

Spending months extra trying to do the perfect architecture is harder to justify.