> My classic C programmer curmudgeon take is that the root of the problem, as with everything else in this industry, is bad software built on top of bad software built on top of bad software... and on it goes.
No, not really. Nowadays things are way way better than how they were a decade ago. Nowadays you can get pipelines that build and test on multiple target platforms with a dozen or so lines of code, and things run so well that they became reliable infrastructure integrated with your prod system.
Back then you had none of this, and had to pay the salary for a "build engineer" who worked like a wizard stirring a cauldron just to get a single production build out of the door.