In my view, it is a form of incompetence so common and, in practice essential for growth as a business that it has become a ubiquitous baseline against which we should strive to differentiate ourselves from.

It is complexity that is accepted in small amounts across dozens of projects over many years. Projects that add real value to the business while contributing to this invisible debt that from the business point of view, matters only once it has started directly affecting your revenue.

Eventually an organization can't scale without a major refactoring, rewrite, or an entirely new market vertical.