However it is that it is architectured internally seems to have helped it grow over time and not collapse under the weight of 30 years of hacks and poor decisions.
Link to AOSA for others' convenience: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
Countless hacks hanging off one giant MVC.
And having a few core devs with veto powers has helped a bunch with it never getting bogged down with bad decisions. I tried to get some iffy stuff tacked on but they (mostly Campbell) would be “umm, what’s this good for?” And don’t even think about adding a null check to prevent a segfault without getting permission first, like, signed in blood…in triplicate.