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> Humans are not good at programming. I've never seen a "done" C++ codebase in my life, maintainers are always too busy reinventing parts that had originally nothing to do with the feature scope of their library.

No reason to limit to "C++" there. It's an industry wide problem with every language. Even in open source, if a repo hasn't had commits in the last week, most people treat it as a dead project.

> if a repo hasn't had commits in the last week, most people treat it as a dead project

By "most people", you mean GitHub-era folks who are secretly more interested in the things about the site that fulfill their social needs than they are interested in solving the problem that the software is supposed to be used for.

I think that's the major problem with software engineering in general: when is software "done" ?

When you can no longer remove anything else.

I can’t even imagine getting back into C and knowing where to begin to do it “right” and get to a useful level.