Totally unsurprising if you've ever worked with Oracle. The layers upon layers of legacy cruft are plainly visible even in simple things like the GUI installers.
The field of software engineering has matured a lot since then.
There are quite a few very old projects that don't have the same level of cruft as Oracle; it epitomises a Sales Division driven culture.
How many of those switches (that now need to be supported and tested) are because some functionality was promised to a large contract, and so it just had to be done? I would wager a good number.