Well, yes, I am saying from a business perspective this worked. but I also think we got lucky. Around five years ago, a little before the high profile failure, we were starting to
lose marketshare, and though we've been able to claw most of it back, I think it's far more due to missteps of our competitors than our own performance. Had we invested in more sustainable development earlier, I think we would have been able to move faster to take advantage of new opportunities, diversify our revenue streams earlier (adding to them now is hamstrung in large part because of tech debt), and head off competitors faster.
In fact, once we started investing in that kind of development, we did do that with a successful new feature that we developed much more quickly than we could have in the past, and it's because of that success that leaders are finally starting to prioritize building standardized and reusable infrastructure.
EDIT: I think another way to say this is, once we knew our strengths and how we'd be successful in the future, we should have operationalized that and hardened it, so we'd have a sustainable advantage over competitors. Instead, we kept the "move fast, be flexible, and throw man-hours at problems" mentality too long, and it put us at risk.