Comment by Dead3

The OP is right most production code is full of errors, and suffers from code bloat and feature creep that impacts UX.

Is this really the best we can do? It strikes me as unacceptable to ship errors to production, yet it's commonplace.

Code quality matters, and being in touch with users/dogfooding matters. But that can only address the underlying problem by eliminating the low-talent developers who win by numbers.

How to solve the relevant problems is not something hiring and recruiting teams can assess. So, hiring process uses proxy metrics like having a HS and CS degree, years of experience, brand name companies, list of tools, "best practices", trends, etc.

Teams of self-congratulating code monkeys using all the latest 'industry standard' libraries and tools, don't accept responsibility for their errant code. Instead, they blame (the user, his browser, the library), make excuses, minimize "all software has bugs". They can't fix the bugs they've created for themselves, but it can't be their fault, after all, they're doing what everyone else is doing.

The answer is to send them packing. Hire by talent, not by proxy of a hiring team (who don't know how to think/use the aforementioned proxy metrics to gauge talent).

Intelligence cannot be taught, but it can and is discriminated against. That is another problem with these faux 'team-player' follower types. Anyone on the team pointing out the code is a disaster and an attitude to fix it is not going to last. He'll be fed pushback of the same crap excuses for why things must be done the way they're done.

When a talented developer does deep dive analysis to identify root causes, most on the team don't get it. The scary bugbear of coherence is too hard and threat to the team's shared narrative.

Again, the only way to solve that problem is to send them packing.