Funny how word 'Enterprise' picks up more and more negative connotation in modern software world. These days, 'enterprise' means outdated, inflexible and intentionally flawed monster of technology.
Many that throw jabs at J2EE (written on purpose), never had the joys of trying out xBaseEE, CEE, C++EE (CORBA, DCOM/MTS),...
In comparison to some of their other hardware, these servers were more suited to organizations with more demanding needs like minimizing downtime or having lots of compute power or configuration flexibility.
But of course people quickly realized that a key characteristic of actual enterprise computing is large budgets, so it almost immediately turned into a game of labeling things with the word "enterprise" in hopes of vacuuming up as much of that money as possible.
There are these large corporations with a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and systems - and now they all need to make them interop. The mindset is “how do we make our CORBA ERP communicate with their Java CRM without needing to make any changes to either of them?”. Hence SOAP: It packages existing method-call semantics into a HTTP message that will cross a firewall: not even the IT dept needs to get involved to change firewall rules. And they hammered out a working spec within a couple years. That’s impressive considering the slow-moving nature of large, risk-averse enterprises. We now know that REST-is-Best, but it took the industry around 10 years to figure that out, and another 5 years for the tooling and ecosystem to catch up. SOAP was a quick-fix that was needed immediately.
So I’d recharacterise “Enterprise software” as “fits into your existing system and does what you need it to, right now” - and their MC Escher-inspired architecture is a consequence of it needing to support and fit-in to whatever systems were prevalent when their project was started.
It’s not Enterprise software that’s rigid and inflexible - but cutting-edge software that I have more problems with. I was working with Neo4j in 2016 and having issues with security because it didn’t have any built-in security support until last year. I had to change what I was doing to accommodate them, instead of vice-versa.
More often than not, those MC Escher-inspired architecture as you call it, are the result of corporate politics with each department having a say in how their tooling should look like, and bringing in externals to actually build it for them at lowest bid with fixed cost projects.
It turned me grey, bald and cynical aka experienced in every possible way to fuck something up. That turned out to be quite valuable!