Dead-end Driven Development happens when the majority of a developer's time is spent working with technologies that hurt their career. The way you end up like this is often because the projects you were initially hired for have reached a maintenance state.
Instead of rewarding developers who have successfully completed the tasks they were initially hired for by assigning them tasks that benefit both their career and the company's goals, developers who meet management's expectations are often assigned to legacy projects that are riddled with obscure bugs, strange architecture, and bad choices. The end goal of these tasks is often to upgrade a system that uses ancient technologies in order to ease some customer's mind.
In this situation burnout eventually creeps in and the engineer faces two choices: either they start doing something that puts their career back in the right track (MDD) despite the consequences, or they find another job that improves their situation.
In the previous economy I would expect most people to pick option 1. In the current economy I'd expect an overwhelming majority to pick option 2.