Yeah. One thing I've noticed is that people are really bad at working towards high-level, nebulous goals like "code quality, right abstractions, decoupling, cohesion". Keeping these goals in mind requires constant thought, analysis and decision making as each case is different and there's no universal solution.

So people jump at simple, single-faceted goals like "normalise the database", "spin out microservices", "don't use HTML tables", "rewrite using Rust" etc. These involve no further thought, no continuous evaluation of nebulous targets like quality, no keeping up with moving goals.

It explains quite a lot of problems with politics too. Choose from red or blue. No further thinking required. If even that's too difficult, just pick the one your parents/friends picked. Easy!