> Simple, direct, and declarative code

... works only in an ideal world where nothing changes, i.e. where software written once is so good that you don't need to touch it.

In reality though, what happens to successful software projects is that once the management and the customers see that it works and is good enough they always, always start to request more features. In fact in the minds of managers adding a feature is just adding a feature, should be easy right? Well no, a lot of the times it's not. Too often adding features affects some core abstractions in the code in such ways known only to the developers that adds technical debt.

"Let's redesign the home feed. Should be easy, right?"