Don't get me wrong - CI/CD itself is of course a product subject to ongoing evolution and challenges such as scaling, aging, vulnerabilities, etc.
But usually, I would expect that "Project ABC" will build all its infra and CI/CD usage early on and then just proceed to consume that CI/CD as a commodity service, with ad-hoc changes needed to continue playing nicely with that service.
>> What I have found particularly infuriating is large companies with billions of dollars in revenue choose to completely ignore the productivity decline that comes from poor CI/CD
I hear you :-(
In my experience, this is not true. At any large company with thousands of engineers hammering the CI/CD/development thingys, a CI/CD failure is an incident unto itself. And it often requires A LOT of maintenance.
And you can't just offload it to gitlab or whatver because you WILL need to build abstractions over it.
What I have found particularly infuriating is large companies with billions of dollars in revenue choose to completely ignore the productivity decline that comes from poor CI/CD, and then demand faster work from engineers who are hamstrung by poor infrastructure.