Sorry, this made me laugh. I know there are software engineers which build clean and polished beautiful mega structures. I _aspire_ to that. Yet that is a niche market.
In reality, most devs are making unique family Vilas at best.
I wish I could ever say I feel like I contributed to an equivalent of 'Sydney Opera House'.
There are deep analysis from the project management perspective but one point was that initial estimates were based on historical assumptions while some elements were novel and couldn’t be estimated with those techniques.
With software it’s similar. We have some general feel how things should work but often there’s “this” novel part that no one did before and it’s wishful thinking, leading to budget and timeline spillover.
If you ever had to guess-estimate something you never saw and it turned out to be overly optimistic - that’s similar case to Sydney Opera House (which I recommend to read about as there are many analyses of the case from various project-related points)
After which the internals were completed by a set of "government architects" that did as about a good a job as you'd expect.
Not to mention that the original design had its own issues, including not actually being able to support proper opera theatrical performances due to the size and structure of the internals.
(I’m sure there are other examples but my mind has an information security bias and I learned about “Snake” recently.)
Not the bespoke CMS I work on for Bob’s Bait Shop.