I think the “never look back” mindset of product growth is a major driver of code bloat.

Rarely are engineering teams allowed time to go back and refine and optimize legacy code, until it’s a blazing dumpster fire… and even then.

Products never seem to have enough features, so engineering teams plow forward. When a component absolutely needs a rewrite, the rewrite is often implemented with the same haste as the original.

Given the time, I think every engineer could easily factor out vast swaths of code and refine what’s left to be much leaner.

I feel like the same goes for programming languages and platforms. Most devs would prefer to spend their time adding new capabilities rather than optimizing a few lines of code out of existing ones.

But then again “Perfect is the enemy of good” and “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and “We’ve got 731 items on the roadmap, so let’s go!”