Maybe you never heard about it, but it was the leading social network before MySpace then Facebook.
It was unable to scale, and as a consequence suffered bad performances and downtime and eventually all the users moved to more recent SN.
MySpace also had similar problems, their main app was an crappy ColdFusion app that they struggled to update to add features or fix bugs.
Facebook on the other hand, was far better technically and it's probably why they won the social network war.
MySpace was sold to News Corporation for millions, it definitely didn't fail as a startup. There's a point where code quality becomes important, I don't think anyone's denying that, but it's after you've got traction and product-market fit.
(That was linked from http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... but I had to fix the link, since it went to apps.ycombinator.com which must have been the HN URL at the time. Maybe dang can update DNS to make those old links redirect? Everything after the host was still correct.)
If devs are spending time “up-leveling their experience”, that just indicates that it’s a pretty slow-paced field where that time can be traded. It doesn’t mean anything about the business itself.