Another way of making this point is: what could make Conway's Law totally wrong? What evidence could do that? It seems like shifting sands -- there is always something that fits the "pattern"; the problem is the pattern is not defined a priori: it feels like getting your organization's palm read.
Organized people are organized.
People who value short-term experiments will make short-term experiments.
The only part that is palm-reader level is the translation across contexts. And I agree that it’s a terrible law, but probably a decent rule of thumb, that someone who is tidy in one area of their life is likely tidy in others. But yeah, we shouldn’t really look into it any more than that.
It’s like other vague assumptions that our brain makes. Probably correct to some degree sometimes, but not a hard rule by any means.
For example, if a team is responsible for two modules of an application they are less likely to create an API because the modules can communicate directly inside the application (i.e. monolith)
If the same two modules are cared for by separate teams, then maybe they end up being two separate API services.
It both cases there is organization, just different types of organization.
People who like experimentation, chaos, prototyping, flat hierarchies, etc, will also tend to congregate together, and the systems that they build will also have those values.
Same for lots of different qualities. It isn’t A->B or B->A, it’s more like A<->B<->C.