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I’ve seen some of that as well. After a very large refactoring is done it is initially claimed a success by the lead but to only slowly dawn on the rest of the team that the codebase is not better, just more complicated without any significant gains. Mess is still there, it’s just a unfamiliar one. Questions to the lead of the refactoring project cannot be answered as they are long gone some other place.

Of course that could be the case, but in my experience , the inverse is way more common. A team is tasked with rearchitecting some part of a system, and by the time they’re done, everyone is burnt-out and one-after-another the engineers leave the company.

The goal was never to “level up”, it’s just that these large deliverables take a lot out of you.

Leaving during the middle of the project would be worse.

This is an attrition issue. The company lost an employee, fair game.

It actually seems like a good sign to me that they completed their current project before jumping ship.