It just feels like an amateur hour thing.

If my plumber came to me to ask if he can just dry assemble the pipes and leave them that way I'm gonna get a new plumber.

That’s assuming you know something about plumbing. If you don’t, you’ll just nod your head and say ok, that sounds good. The same thing is happening in these businesses. The business owners generally don’t know programming. Terms like “refactoring” mean nothing to them at best and sounds like “rewrite from scratch” at worst.

It's scary out there, man. A lot of people in HN judge by US companies and startups but I've only been in that bubble once for a few months and the rest of my 20 years of career has been everywhere else. And it's insanely bad in many places.