There is a survivorship bias at play here. You experienced the startups that survived long enough to need to evolve their tech stack, and presumably the 'mad scientist' tech stack had some part to play in that.

> Home built web frameworks (which apparently aren’t “bloated” and “slow”)

Well, let me show you something: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/31624

This is a performance regression of Django's ORM for deleting rows from a table, a query that should be about as simple as it gets:

    delete from tbl;

And yet it's orders of magnitude slower because it somehow generates a bloated query. So yeah, let me tell you, the frameworks that people are using off the shelf–there's a pretty good chance that they're 'bloated' and 'slow'.

> piles of bash scripts because they never heard of Salt (or whatever is the latest config management tool)…

Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? If you're trying to get a project off the ground as quickly as possible, you kinda don't care about 'whatever is the latest config management tool', you will use what is already in your toolbox that will get the job done.

the op was talking about hardware, I think. but you are spot-on on the mad scientist. we are just in the process to de-clutter all the non standard, hand made, highly customized, never documented, stuff produced buba coworker that, unfortunately, passed away.

btw, we also wrote a HA cluster software for sun solaris in year 2000...