Comment by derefr

Fixing the thing isn't usually easier. In an ops environment, you're not dealing with Git repos full of source code that you can just patch and run through CI; you're usually dealing with pre-built packages from an apt server, or pre-built Docker images, or pre-built virtual-appliance VMs. And usually these are all created in drastically-varying, heterogeneous ways, many again by third-parties (public Apt packages, public Docker images, etc.), but even if internal, then by different internal teams with different favored approaches toward building and deploying things.

From the position in the pipeline where ops people operate, it's more work to figure out how to fork a build of software X, patch it, build it, and get out the same kind of artifact your deploy pipeline is expecting, hosted in the same place; as it is to just throw more spaghetti at the wall to solve the problem.

Half of the reason behind Google's monorepo, and the focus on Golang, is to empower SREs to patch broken components when possible, by making there be only One True Way to do that, and only one language (without weird per-project DSLs) to know. But that still doesn't completely fix the problem, since you still need to understand the architecture of the software project, and sometimes that's the hardest part.